Fed Up With Overtime? Try These!

We know that overtime work is often not within our control, but sometimes it can be. Just try your best to make your overtime workload a minimum. 

Employees are often tasked to do a lot of work which leads to stressful and long hours. Yet, they are doing it for the sake of higher payments. Thanks to the high product demands of most companies, employees have better chances to be paid on an overtime-basis and get higher payments all together.

Employees around the globe think that working beyond 40 hours per week will make them more productive and help them finish more work. In general, working beyond 40 hours per week is simply unproductive.

However, CATO Institute, an American public research organization, revealed that overtime hours are highly more taxable than those regular working hours in a week. According to this research, the higher the number of hours worked by an employee, the higher the tax bracket an employee belongs to. This is another burden for both employees and employers.

On the other hand, having overtime will be a burden to the employee, too. It makes the weekends much stressful and not relaxing. Therefore, any hired individuals should avoid working overtime. Therefore, work in a regular number of hours. Here are some ways to avoid overtime:

1. Be early to work.

There's a famous saying, "An early bird catches the worm." If an employee goes to work as early as he can, thus, he can also finish a lot of stuff early, too. As simple as that. In most cases, employees goes to offices tardy, that's why, they usually make their 8-hour work longer since they have to finish stuff needed to be done in a day.

2. Be organized.

What wise employees do to save time amid tons of work to finish in a day, they usually have a to-do-list. This is really important to organize the job to do without procrastinating everything and at the same time, one can meet deadlines in a very hectice schedule though there are still lots of them are left unfinished.

3. Make a priority list.

Aside from making a to-do-list, make sure to make a list of things needed to be finished earlier than the others assigned. In this way, it will make work more systematic, fast, and punctual to the deadlines of each work.

4. Be wise in spending your breaks.

Having a break time does not mean doing unnecessary chats and dilly-dallies with office mates. This is good to be nice to colleagues but make sure it doesn't consume much of your vacant time. Make your vacant time more productive since this is the perfect time to freshen up and to relax a bit after hours of stressful work.

5. Weigh your meetings to attend.

By having an invitation to the meeting, does not mean that every time, an employee should always say "YES". Weigh the agenda and the importance of the meeting over the assigned work to be finished in a certain deadline. Not unless if the meeting is related to the work assigned. That would be okay and substantial.

6. Learn to say "NO".

This is a wise act by an employee. No need to be a superhero who can do every thing assigned. No one can do that especially if the deadlines are really hectic. By saying yes all the time, it will make your work more chaotic and unorganized. Before saying yes to a certain assignment, make sure to check your to-do-list and your priorities set in that day or in that week (stated in number 2 and 3). If the new task is already unmanageable, just say no to it and let others do the work.

7. No "Facebook-ing" at work.

This is a big no, no. Doing Facebook-ing, Twitter-ing, and so on really make big procrastination to the work and at the same time in the work place through wasting much of the time doing useless things and reading unnecessary posts from friends instead of reviewing the work or doing the assignment to meet the deadline.

8. Make your worktable clean.

If your worktable is clean, it will also clear up your mind midst very hectic work schedules and tons of work to be done.

9. Go home on time.

If your work ends in 5 o'clock in the afternoon, then go home in that hour.. No need to waste time extending more minutes or some hours after the regular working hours. Well, you're trying to avoid overtime, why doing so?

10. Don’t do other stuff besides work.

If the goal is to finish work in a certain time, make sure to have it in mind to achieve that goal. Therefore, don’t do other unrelated stuff to the task. For example, if the assigned responsibility is related to the communications of the company, just focus on responding emails, answering calls, and other tasks related should be accomplished.

Working more hours in a given time make any workers sound more hard working, determined, and interested in the job. But this is a wrong view of achieving 100% success in work. 

In order to achieve the set goals (that each company reminds their employees), make sure to do smart working instead. 

To do this, each employee should be focused on the given job and not doing tasks apart from the assigned. It’s good to be helpful but not all times. They are hired to do the job, therefore, they should be acquainted that they are employed to attain the aim. This, too, applies to you as an employee. By doing these, for sure, you can avoid working overtime.