Overspending and gambling are treated as problems. Working long hours is often praised instead.
Why business owners get hit hardest
If you own the thing, the work is never finished, and there is always a defensible reason for the next hour. It is also, unlike most compulsions, financially rewarded — at least at first. That makes it hard to notice.
The underlying belief is usually some version of I am worth what I produce. A successful year does not change that belief.
A sign to watch is what happens when you stop. If a free week with nothing in it brings dread rather than relief, take note.
The Working Time Regulations
British employment law contains a limit on working hours. The Working Time Regulations cap the average working week at 48 hours, measured over a 17-week reference period. They give workers 5.6 weeks of paid annual leave a year — 28 days for somebody on a five-day week. Under-18s get a firmer version again: no more than 8 hours a day or 40 hours a week.
It protects workers and employees. Self-employed people have no right to paid holiday under it, and managing executives with autonomous decision-taking power are written out of the weekly limit specifically. Adults who are covered can sign the 48-hour cap away in writing whenever they like.
So the legal limit applies to your staff but not to you. Any limit on your own hours is one you set, and staff tend to follow the hours you keep.
What an hour of your time earns
This calculation takes about ten minutes.
Worked example — illustrative figuresAn owner takes £60,000 out of her business across the year, salary and dividends combined. She works 46 weeks once you allow for the fortnight she took and the odd day off. At 40 hours a week that is 1,840 hours, and her time is worth £32.61 an hour. At the 60 hours she actually works — the evenings, the Sunday quoting, the Saturday morning catching up — it is 2,760 hours, and the same £60,000 is worth £21.74 an hour.
The extra 920 hours added nothing to what she took out. For them to have been worth what the first 1,840 were, they needed to add about £30,000 of profit. Say they added £12,000, which would be a good year: those hours earned £13.04 each. The National Living Wage from 1 April 2026 is £12.71 an hour for anyone aged 21 or over. Her extra hours earned about 33p an hour more than the National Living Wage.
Two caveats. Some of those hours may be investment in something that pays later. And an owner's return can arrive as equity rather than income, which this sum does not capture at all. The figure turns the question into what the extra hours produce.
What overwork costs
- Time with family and friends that is missed.
- The people around you experience it as absence, whatever the intention behind it was.
- Children may adopt the same working pattern.
- Less enjoyment of the work, even as the hours rise.
- A more fragile business. A company that depends on one person is worth less to a buyer and harder to hand on.
A test you can run this week
Over ten working days:
- Log every working hour, including the ones that do not look like work: the evening email check, the phone call in the car, the Sunday quote.
- Mark each block with one letter. O — only you can do this. T — could be trained out of your hands within six months. N — should not be happening at all: rework, chasing, a problem you created by being permanently available.
- Total each column and price it using your hourly figure from the sum above. The T and N columns now have a cost in pounds.
- Remove the single biggest N.
The O column is often smaller than expected, and the N column becomes a figure. The decision rule: any recurring task that sits below your effective hourly rate and does not specifically require you is a pricing or hiring decision.
A question to ask
What are you working towards, and how will you know when you have got there?
Put a figure on “enough”. Start with what leaves your account in a year. Then ask: what would have to be true for the business to produce that in forty hours rather than sixty? The answers lie in prices, customer mix and who does what.
What your money needs to produce for you to stop work altogether is covered in when can you retire?
When this is bigger than a business problem
Coaching covers hours, pricing and priorities. If the pattern is propped up alongside sleep you cannot fix, drinking that has quietly crept up, or a relationship ending in slow motion, that belongs with your GP rather than a coach. Samaritans answer free on 116 123, day or night, every day of the year. And if the pressure underneath the hours is money rather than ambition start at our money worries page, where MoneyHelper, StepChange and National Debtline are all free and independent.
Do the calculation, run the ten-day log and stop the biggest item in the N column. The Financial Plan does this with your own figures.