In long-term employment, once you're in a spot where you're doing clock watching, both the employee and the employer are much worse off. I probably work on ave

In long-term employment, once you're in a spot where you're doing clock watching, both the employee and the employer are much worse off. I probably work on average an hour or two a week above my contracted hours (depends how you count stuff like handling a few urgent things from home etc), but I see it as a loose agreement - I get a pile of cash each month in return for generating as much value as I can in roughly 40h/week. Sometimes that means that I work 18h in a row (rollout of a new product for instance) and sometimes it means I leave early on a slow day. While the agreement says in pretty black and white that I work 9-18 Mon-Fri (I think - it was a long time since I read it), neither side is trying to encode the agreement fully, nor follow it to the letter, because doing so would be detrimental to both of us.