What are everyone’s opinions on weekend working? It feels like a necessity if you want to clear the backlog. It also means that work becomes all consuming
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Great job on your work ethic, but weekends should really be for relaxing and recharging. I personally like to put in longer hours during the week so I can keep my weekends free. If this is becoming a regular thing for you, it might be worth spending your weekends searching for a job with a better work-life balance. 
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Are you a medical doctor? Can you recommend pharmaceutical aides to promote weekend relaxation 
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Add some alcohol to your usual diet of cocaine and tomatoes
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For many years I worked most weekends, in fact 14-16 hours a day, seven days a week. If you’re in a managerial, director or MD role, it’s kind of expected of you.
That’s why an awful lot of people in the industry burn out by their 40’s and, the industry doesn’t care because, there’s a pipeline of keen, eager, hungry talent queuing at the door.
If you have squirrelled enough away up until that point, great. If not, you’re in for a bit of a rude awakening as everyone steps over your body and laments your long term illness for about 3 days, until their own priorities kick back in.
Only you can tell whether it is sustainable, but only in very rare cases is it.
I was at one firm a few decades ago and the common practice was to say No to everything at least three times and only pay attention on the fourth request, if it had been escalated.
The industry is extremely poorly managed, unless you’re in one of the unionised large UK clearing banks. Then they’re just poorly managed.
Having large amounts of other people’s money to earn money off of the back of, means the industry doesn’t really have to work as hard as the poor s0ds that we charge a fortune to for the privilege.
We earn between 4 and 10 times what people in other industries earn for almost exactly the same work, we simply use different terminology.
You make your own decisions.
You can move to one of the several hundred smaller foreign firms in the City and Canary Wharf that have a better work/life balance but, politics is even heavier than in large firms, progression is non existent and compensation is much lower than in one of the big firms.
Best of luck in the choices that you make…
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I like the way you think.
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I guess it depends on the role. In my jobs I’ve never ever needed to work during weekends.
Apart from when I was an underpaid postdoc in academia, ironically.
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Is this a dating site?
You’ve got to evaluate it on two fronts:
- Would working weekends benefit you?
- Is it a one-time thing rather than a consistent expectation?
If the answer is yes to both, then you should do it. Sometimes you get a backlog of tasks that’s just too untenable, and putting in a little extra effort will relieve a lot of anxiety you’d otherwise face having to do those tasks in your regular working days.
If you’re working weekends just because you were told to, or because you did it one time and it spiralled into an expectation, you need to break the cycle. Having dedicated periods of time where you’re not working is very important for both your health and your social life.
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I don’t mind if a project with a deadline is approaching and I’m either offered monetary or time in lieu compensation and it’s not the norm.
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What if they want you to do more work with neither increased pay nor TOIL?
Sadly they’d rather us toil than pay us TOIL
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Then you start looking for a new job.
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