FEBRUARY 15 — How late do you stay in the office? What are your reasons? Do you not like seeing the sun set on workdays? Do you struggle with it?

There was a software company I used to work for in Singapore. Every day there would be Drama Hari Ini involving the Employee Ledger all of us had to sign each time we left the office. This is what happened: Those who had to leave around 6pm would a) sign their names really small in the Exit Ledger (yeah, I know, right? Macam factory, kan?) and b) creeeeep out the doorway like cat burglars.

This was the austere fate visited upon the corporate drones who dared to leave work "on time."

And those who left around 10pm or later? They would a) sign their name really damn BIG in the ledger and b) walk out of the office like KING bleedin’ KONG.

In another company I was with, the recurring joke in the HR department was how the traffic is always clear between Cheras and Masjid Jamek. 

When I first heard a manager make that statement I was, like, you smokin’ something bad-ass or am I just slow? He then looked at me VERY SERIOUSLY and said, "2am. It’s clear at 2am, you free-loading 5.30pm-leaving clock-watching piece of shit.”

All over the globe, working hours have increased. The "official" 40-hour week is a laughing stock in some companies. Especially after the 2007-2008 crisis, when economic fear and desperation set in, the very thought of losing one’s bread-and-butter spurs more white-collar folks to skip practically all weekday dinners with their families and treat their homes like for-sleep-only pods so the office gods will smile brightly on them.

Unfortunately, whilst post-40hour work weeks are the "new normal", this doesn’t necessarily translate to greater productivity. Heck, in countries like Japan, it’s said that staying late is not primarily about working longer but about being in the office longer. In China, people simply sit in their cubicles way past closing time despite there being absolutely nothing zilch nada e-lek else to do.

From my own experience, I can confirm that many of my former colleagues had this habit of "chilling out" between lunch and dinner because they knew they were going to stay until 9pm anyway. In other words, the "real" work happened after dinner.

Read around a bit (or just, uh, work in Malaysia for a while?) and a key reason stands out, one which every Tom, Dick and newborn Harry knows: It’s about culture. Making a stand-out impression a la "being seen" in the office way past 6pm is part of the corporate ethos. For some people, asking why they work late is like asking why Malaysians love nasi lemak.

Refuse to stay late and not only will you not stand out, you could become a frickin’ outcast. You’ll lose rapport with your managers, thrown out on the streets and forced to fight with street animals for food.

Work-life balance? Forget it. Get a divorce, send your kids to an orphanage and rent a room next to the office.

Then again, if you ask me, in many companies today the person who really stands out is the dude or dudette who is so darn effective and efficient s/he doesn’t NEED to waste her life working even a minute beyond official closing time.

Sad to say, such a person would likely be asked to leave. Why? Because only losers can’t understand that winning is about warming your office chair until midnight during the weekdays (and some weekends).

Needless to say, nobody ever inserts "Work Until Dawn" into their annual KPIs or work plans. In theory, you can stay back until 6am every day and still not hit the pre-agreed upon KPIs. Again, "working late" is never an officially documented requirement. It’s simply…"required."

Pros

This is not to say that there isn’t a point in working late or even that there aren’t some benefits.

Some workers are genuinely less productive than others, hence they need more time. Throw in the 183 requests that tend to happen between walking from one’s desk to the toilet, and it’s not surprising if some folks need to stay back regularly. They wouldn’t be able to complete their work otherwise.

Drawing from my own experiencing in consulting, working late may also be a non-negotiable in some projects. This could be the case where the activity involving the system can only happen after office hours or if said project is severely time-boxed. This may include end-of-day runs, unit testing, project cutover, etc. In such cases, to not stay late could significantly blow the budget.

(Having said that, one has to ask how and why these projects always overrun projected timeframes and costs despite the frequent late-nights. It’s almost as if management consultants have no choice but to be up all night?)

There are a few other good reasons for staying late but the one and only absolutely positively super bad-ass reason for doing so is — drumroll — because you’re totally in love with your job.

You’re crazy about your work, you love your team and every frickin’ moment fills you with something akin to eternal joy. That’s why you work from 8am to forever. Any other reason to work late and you’re either tripping’ or trapped in a corporate cage.

But, heck, at the end of the day if your family isn’t complaining (and you’re fine with it all), then what the hell? Just work until the moon turns green and high-fives the sun, why doncha?! There’s no downside — or is there?

Cons

From the zillion health-related articles on the subject, it appears as if you’d be healthier smoking 10 Marlboros an hour than working late. The Australian National University claims that if you push past 39 hours a week too often, your mind and your body starts to rot, your heart becomes more fragile and you might just drop bloody dead.

Basically, those quips about workaholics having no life aren’t that far off the mark. Workaholism may actually cause you to die young.

Working late also affects family life (wait, didn’t I say that earlier?). This is especially so for women. For new and soon-to-be mums, "normal" office life dah susah sangat for you and your baby, let alone the kind of life which makes clocking out at 8pm appear "early." I also personally know quite a few friends who have quit their jobs just to take care of their children.

In fact, I recall someone proudly declaring how he "didn’t have the luxury to leave at 5.30pm.” I can imagine many mums (or just folks who cherish every second with their families) replying,"Well guess what, pal, I don’t have the luxury not to."

Finally, given how some studies suggest that longer hours do NOT equal more productivity, we have to wonder why almost no CEOs stand up and speak against this crazy habit.

So, there we have it: Lots of studies suggesting that not only are late hours bad for your health, they’re also unproductive and they’re usually "performed" for the sake of sandiwara i.e. we work late not because someone really "cares" but mainly because we BELIEVE others care (when they may really not).

So how lah?

It’s probably no surprise that Malaysians prefer a better work-life balance. We don’t need a PhD to grasp this: people simply have a life outside of work, and they want to live it.

A popular solution is this big-sounding phrase called work-life integration. This is basically to embrace the increasing "blending" of office home play friend colleague job hobby organisation family here there now then past future ooooh!

This ain’t so much about working less or leaving office earlier; it’s about working differently, erasing the barriers between work and non-work (almost like how WhatsApp and Facebook makes it hard to tell the diff between social media and, uh, social life? As in, do we have social lives apart from social media?). 

So maybe work can be like life and vice-versa? It sounds like something a Zen guru would say. Also seems to appeal more to Gen Y and Millennials.

Buuuuut (and maybe this is the "old guy" speaking) all this kind of talk reminds of a conversation with a senior manager in Singapore a decade ago. She told all of us that we should learn to "blend" our working lives with our family lives, that with social media we can make the "seamless transition" between work and play, blahblahblah.

I was like, long story short, you just want us to take our work home, right?

So, if you’re a mega late-night worker, the first step is to be aware of why exactly you’re doing it. It’s almost no different from being "aware" of why you get angry at certain people, why you feel embarrassed on some occasions, why you keep saying a certain word or performing a certain act, etc. If you’re going to burn midnight office oil, as per Socrates, know thyself.

This way, however late you stay (or early you leave), chances are you’re doing so because you totally totally want to do it. You’re not doing it because "that’s the way things are", or because "everyone else is doing it", or because "dammit I don’t even know why I’m doing it."

It’s not at all about shirking work responsibilities or cutting corners. At the end of the (office) day, it’s about good time management.

Do you know what your priorities are? Work on those.

Say No or Later to anything else that doesn’t fall within pre-agreed "Important Stuff."

If your boss is the kind who keeps throwing last-minute shit at you which forces you to do "unpaid overtime", then tell him you’ll do it tomorrow morning because you’re committed to something else and you’ve got plans at 6pm.

If you get fired for it, maybe that’s an indication you shouldn’t be there. Period.

Think about it? (But don’t take all night).

* This is the opinion of the columnist