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BEYOND MONDAY
The Madness of Hidden Overtime
Who really suffers when we tell lies about our work?
This is likely to be the angriest article I ever write.
I’m going to lay this out as clearly as I can while trying to avoid combusting.
A friend of mine works for an organisation whose mission (irritating word) is to support extremely vulnerable adults. I won’t mention particular people — you can believe me when I say that these are people whose lives are, in many ways, unmanageable without help. Paying rent. Managing bills. Brushing their teeth. They find the fundamentals of daily life very hard.
Layer on top of that the coping behaviours — the drugs, the drink, the rash decisions — that emerge when life is that challenging, and you can see how much support is required.
My friend is part of a team responsible for helping them. One of that team’s core responsibilities is to write detailed case reports — multi-page documents compiling information from “stakeholders” (another irritating word in this context), interviews, and formal assessments.
The people being supported are called “clients,” as though they’ve made an appointment at a law firm. Someone probably decided it sounded dignified. It mostly sounds detached.
Now here’s the problem.
It has been decided — who knows how — that producing one of these reports takes, let’s call it, X hours.
In reality, it takes XXX hours.
Much, much longer.
But no one says that.
Instead, people work Saturdays and Sundays. They work in the evenings after their children are in bed. They disguise their activity by putting “not at work” notices on their laptops so no one can see they’re online.
What kind of madness is this?
Capacity Tracking and Other Fictions
I saw a diluted version of this in a previous company I worked for. There was software — always referenced with solemn authority — that “tracked capacity.” Apparently we were on the third iteration of it. I’m not convinced it ever meant anything.
Sometimes “no capacity” meant, “I don’t want to do that.”
Sometimes “you have capacity” meant, “The system says you’re free, so here’s a task you weren’t expecting.”
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I don’t object to hard work. I don’t object to extra responsibility. What I object to is the outsourcing of judgment — the outsourcing of reality — to software or basing it on some made-up number.
In my case, it was annoying.
In the case of my friend and her colleagues, it’s an outrage.
Because here, the consequences are not corporate inefficiencies. They are vulnerable human beings.
Everyone is lying to everyone else.
The leadership pretends the work takes X hours.
The staff pretend they can complete it in X hours.
And the difference is wearily absorbed into evenings, weekends, exhaustion, and guilt.
What would it take to change this?
I’m tempted to say it would take one brave person to stand up and insist their real hours be counted. To refuse the fiction and tell the truth. To become the heroic whistleblower.
But I’m a sucker for that kind of story.
Part of me thinks what’s needed is something far less dramatic and far more old-fashioned — an old-school time-and-motion study, union scrutiny, someone calmly measuring what the work actually requires. But those days feel long gone and more like the script of an Ealing comedy.
The truth is, I don’t have a solution.
My friend doesn’t have one either.
Her organisation doesn’t even know it needs one.
It doesn’t know it has a problem because the whole situation is shrouded in lies.
So there are no solutions. Only software and capacity. And probably a spreadsheet somewhere.
All I have is anger.
Over to you.
Are there workplace practices that make you furious? That make you stay late, bend reality, or hide the truth just to get by? How do you deal with them?
© Beyond Monday 2026 / 24th February 2026 / All rights reserved.
A trying to reform workaholic, I’m fascinated by office dynamics, workplace drama, and how to get meaning out of life — both at work and at play.
