I refuse to work overtime. In the five years I've been at my current company, I've worked overtime exactly once, and that was because our server was literally on fire. Overtime is just not worth it to me.

I'm a salaried employee. A rather well-paid salaried employee, at least compared to many other professions. In the United States where I live (where I am classified as an "exempt" employee), that means that I will not be paid for work done above and beyond 40 hours a week. So, as far as I am concerned, my employer pays me to work 40 hours a week. I show up on time, I kick ass for 8 hours a day, and then I go home.

What I don't do, at least not on a regular basis, is work overtime.

Unpaid overtime dilutes your hourly rate. If you get paid a salary of $60k per year, that's approximately $29/hr if you work 40 hours a week. If you work just 5 hours more a week (45 hours per week), your hourly rate diminishes to approximately $26/hr. You've just devalued yourself by $3 an hour. Further, you've told your company that that's what your worth, since they're already paying you a set amount. From their perspective, overtime is free work, and who would turn down free work?

And for what? I'm an American, but one of the apparent ideals this country seems to hold is absolutely ludicrous to me: I don't live to work. I've written before that I live to live, to do things with my family. I don't want more money; I already have enough that my family and I can live comfortably, if not extravagantly. I want more time.

Time is the one thing I can't ever get more of. No amount of salary negotiations, of GitHub commits, of stand up meetings can ever replace the time with my family that I lose when I work. And "lose" is the correct word here; it's not time I can make back up.

I have to wonder: why do so many people do this? Why do so many people commit themselves body and soul to a company, to work? I don't have any proof, but I personally think it has a lot to do with the illusion of control.

See, in many people's lives, things are simply beyond our control. We can't always protect our children from every little thing; we can't always get that promotion we so desire; hell, we can't even always catch the damn Pokemon that we need to complete our collection. But we can do our job. We can file the correct paperwork, we can write the appropriate tests, we can get all the appropriate projects planned out months in advance. Those are things we can control.

Control is a big deal. Anything we can control, we tend to hold on to for far longer than we should, far longer than is rational (not that humans are always rational, of course). After all, why lose something when all it takes is our hard work to make it worthwhile?

But it's not. Hard work, work above and beyond what you get paid to do, is not worthwhile. It's the opposite of worthwhile, because it diminishes the amount of time you get to spend on other activities. It reduces the time spent with your family, with your loved ones, with your hobbies that give you purpose. It gives us control, but it also wastes our time. It's a time-sink.

Now, at this point in my life, my most valuable commodity is not money, it's time. I can't get any more, no matter how hard I work. I have a limited amount of keystrokes left in my life and I refuse to voluntarily use them up for some company, some effort, some goal that I don't believe in. I've done that before, and it never works out.

Fellow salaried employees: don't work overtime, at least not on a regular basis. Your time is more valuable than that.