Managing the Risks of Voluntary Overtime
Most of the risks associated with moderate overtime are associated with excessive overtime and schedule pressure. Those risks have been discussed in the previous section. Here is one more.
Reduced capacity to respond to emergency need for still more hours. Scheduling overtime taps into your reserves. If you plan to complete your project by working 40 hours per week, you can ask for overtime when you run into trouble. You can probably ask for it without worrying whether you'll hurt motivation. But on a project in which everyone is already working overtime, you can't ask for more without hurting motivation and reducing productivity, which means that you actually don't have any room to maneuver.
To avoid this ...
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