Every other compulsive behaviour around money gets treated as a problem. Overspending, gambling, hoarding. There is one that reliably gets you promoted instead, and people volunteer it about themselves at dinner parties: “I was in the office until eleven again.”
Nobody says that about the wine.
Why business owners get hit hardest
If you own the thing, the work genuinely 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 combination makes it very hard to see from the inside.
The underlying belief is usually some version of I am worth what I produce. Which is why the successful year doesn't help. Producing more just moves the line.
Worth knowingThe tell is not the hours. It is what happens when you stop. If a free week with nothing in it produces something closer to dread than relief, that is worth paying attention to.
The law has a brake. It is not fitted to you.
British employment law does contain a limit on overwork, and it is worth knowing precisely what it says. 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.
Now read who that covers. It protects workers and employees. Genuinely 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 only formal brake in the system is fitted to everybody in your business except the person setting the pace for all of them. Nobody is going to write to you about your reference period. If a limit is going to exist, you are the one who has to install it — and your team will copy the hours you keep long before they read the policy you wrote.
What an hour of your time is actually worth
Here is the arithmetic almost no owner does, because the answer is unflattering and there is always something more urgent. It 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 a genuine 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.
Those extra 920 hours paid her nothing. 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. She is working the back half of her week for roughly thirty pence an hour more than the law would make her pay somebody else to do it.
Two honest caveats. Some of those hours are genuinely investment — building something that pays later — and that is real. And an owner's return can arrive as equity rather than income, which this sum does not capture at all. Run it anyway. The number tends to end an argument that willpower never wins, because it quietly changes the question from am I working too hard to what exactly am I buying with the second half of my week.
The bill
- It is the most common thing we hear named, years later, as the regret — not the money, the things missed while earning it.
- The people around you experience it as absence, whatever the intention behind it was.
- It reliably passes down. Children of people who work like this tend to arrive at the same standard for themselves.
- The enjoyment usually goes before the hours do. People arrive at coaching working more than they ever have and liking it less than they did at half the volume, which is the clearest sign the hours stopped being about output some time ago.
- The business gets more fragile, not less. A company that only functions while one person is at their desk is worth less to a buyer and harder to hand on, because you are not selling a business — you are selling a job with your name on it.
A test you can run this week
Not “work less”. That is advice nobody has ever successfully taken. Do this instead, 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 carry a cost in pounds, which is the first time most owners have seen one.
- Remove the single biggest N. One of them. Not a new system for all of them, which is how this usually dies in week two.
Two things reliably fall out. The O column is smaller than owners expect — frequently under a third of the total. And the N column stops being a grumble and 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, not a test of stamina.
The question
What are you working towards, and how will you know when you have got there? If there is no answer, the work isn't a strategy — it is a habit with a good excuse.
“Enough” cannot stay a feeling, because a feeling moves every time you reach it. It has to become a figure. Start with what your life actually costs in a year — not what you earn, what leaves the account. Then the question turns into something answerable: what would have to be true for the business to produce that in forty hours rather than sixty? Prices, customer mix, who does what. Those have real answers, which is more than can be said for promising yourself an early finish on Fridays.
The longer-range version of the same sum — what the money needs to produce for you to stop altogether — is worked through in when can you actually retire?
When this is bigger than a business problem
Coaching is the right tool for hours, pricing and priorities. It is not the right tool for everything this can turn into. 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 — debt you are outrunning rather than a business you are building — start at our money worries page, where MoneyHelper, StepChange and National Debtline are all free and independent.
None of this is an argument against ambition. It is an argument for the hours being a decision you make on purpose, with a number attached, rather than a default you drifted into and got congratulated for. Do the sum, run the ten-day log, stop the one thing at the top of the N column. That is a week's work, and it moves more than a year of intending to leave earlier. The Financial Plan is where we do this properly, with your figures rather than an illustration.