Here’s a great thread explaining one of the many ways crunch can manifest and it’s literally nobodies direct, ‘greedy’ fault.

Everyone (management/employees) can feel positive about what they are doing and still have it turn into crunch before they know it. https://twitter.com/kkukshtel/status/1338240765605109762

I’ve seen (and been part of) this first hand. I still do it, working late usually because I’m ‘on a roll’ and don’t want to quit something mid task when I’ve just about cracked it. That’s normal! It can also be problematic!

It’s a hard one to solve too, because personally if I don’t finish that thing or return later in the evening to have another crack at a problem that is bothering me, I’ll not enjoy a movie or lie awake in bed thinking about it instead. That’s just how my brain has always worked.

So how do we fix that conundrum? Well! For me it was a compromise - just being ‘aware’ of that extra time I had spent, and then capturing that in the schedule somehow. If I did a task that was one week but I spend 2 long evenings on it, I can file that as actually 6 days of work.

Now I can know if I’m ‘over-schedule’ even if I *still make my deadlines* and use that knowledge to inform other decisions. It doesn’t solve the problem of me working some nights, but that’s another matter that actually has nothing to do with crunch, and more about personalities.