‘I stopped working flexible hours – it was more exhausting than a 9-to-5'

Telegraph

16 hours ago

Working from Costa Rica was a dream come true for Louise Truman.
She'd spent a year there while studying Spanish at King's College London, amassing over 100,000 followers on TikTok, where she would share videos of her tropical adventures.
She graduated in 2023 knowing exactly what she would do: use her social media skills to set up Plotpackers, a travel company offering group tours aimed at Gen Z.
Truman began building and launching the business, and soon packed her bags for Costa Rica again. She'd wake early to work an eight-hour day by 1pm, so she could spend the afternoon exploring the local beaches, and doing activities like snorkelling and zip-lining.
As her company grew, Truman hired a team who also worked remotely and flexibly to their own schedules.
But by January 2024, the reality of Truman's dream set in. Her flexible schedule began to prove exhausting. The company took £1.5m in sales in its first year, but managing a remote team working conflicting hours was also becoming inefficient.
Truman is just 25 years old and has never had a corporate job before, but it was clear what she had to do: get her team of five on to the same schedule, and get them out of their living rooms and into an office.
'We were all working flexibly with a hybrid setup, and at times some even travelled and worked across time zones, while others built their workday around 'life admin' during the day and caught up in the evenings,' Truman says.
'It did work initially, but as soon as we started growing, it was just impossible. It created such a communications bottleneck, which was really affecting the business.
'It was just honestly awful. There was no balance or switching off, because if you're splitting your work day around life things, they become too integrated. If you're constantly switching between work and life tasks, that's not balanced – that's chaos.'
The rise of the 'infinite workday'
Working flexible hours of your choosing might offer the freedom to fit in guilt-free trips to the hairdresser on a Monday afternoon, or mid-morning gym classes. But such freedom comes at a cost.
Regardless of a carefully worded email signature explaining your flexible schedule, it means that work can realistically encompass an entire day – and beyond.
Such an 'infinite workday', as described in a Microsoft report, means that work-related messages sent outside the typical 9-to-5 workday are up 15pc in the last year, with an average of 58 messages per user now arriving before or after those hours.
It's no wonder, then, that two-thirds of UK employees feel they can't fully switch off from work or maintain a suitable work-life balance, according to a report by HR software company Protime.
Ivy Ngeow worked flexibly for the last 22 years – but is now embracing the boundaries of regular hours.
Ngeow started her own consultancy in 2003, with the aim of combining her architecture career with pursuing her ambition of becoming a novelist. And when her children were born in 2007 and 2011, working flexible hours meant she could be the present parent she wanted to be.
'I was 38 when I had my first child, and I decided I wanted to see every football match, every ballet performance, every Christmas concert. I wanted to be there for them at 3.30pm every day.
'They had no idea that I was even working because I was working when they were asleep and when they were in school, and I was always there for them,' London-based Ngeow recalls.
'I would start at 6am, either working or writing before the kids woke up, then I would stop to do their breakfast at 8am. After they left for school, I'd work from 9am to 3.30pm, then take them to their clubs or classes, and work on a novel or short stories while I'd wait for them. I'd come home and prepare dinner, then start work again at 8pm.
'It was exhausting, but writing was my outlet. I would not have gone self employed if I were not trying to do all these things.'
The flexibility worked for Ngeow in that time. Not only did she build a successful architecture consultancy and raise her children the way she'd envisioned, she also became a successful author, publishing five novels and a short story collection. Her sixth novel, In Safe Hands, will be released by Penguin this autumn.
When her son began A-levels last year though, Ngeow realised she'd been craving routine and structure, and decided it was time to return to the world of 9 to 5 in an office.
She polished up her portfolio, and started a new job last September. The regular hours feel like a revelation, especially in terms of stopping old bad habits and picking up good new ones – although she'll still have to get up early to write.
'I definitely see the improvement in my self-care, because now I can prioritise health and fitness. In the office, I take a lunch break and I can go off and do some weights,' Ngeow says.
'I enjoy the commute as it means I am reading again. I used to read a ton of books before I went into self-employment because that was my habit during commutes and lunchtime. Now that I know the chaos of family life and flexible work, my reading time is me-time.'
'A logistical nightmare'
Flexible work days might seem freeing, but can create a mental state where you're never fully coming to rest, according to clinical psychologist Dr Claire Plumbly.
'When the workday is chopped up – a meeting here, a school run there, a few emails in the evening – our brain and body never fully power down. We stay in 'doing mode', constantly anticipating the next task or ping, and never really signal to the body that it's safe to switch off and properly rest,' Dr Plumbly explains.
'Working and ticking off small tasks gives us little dopamine hits. It's brilliant for productivity, but it doesn't help us feel rested.'
To rest and recover, she adds, we need to rebalance with oxytocin, the neurochemical that supports bonding, safety and present-moment awareness.
'But in a day where you're swapping work and personal tasks, it's hard to shift gears between these two. We can end up staying in the dopamine-driven mode all day long, and get a dopamine crash that feels unpleasant.'
More employers are recognising that too much flexibility can be a bad thing, says Kelly Tucker, who runs consultancy HR Star. Her clients want help moving away from flexible schedules to more consistent patterns across their workforces. A lack of structure, she explains, is having a negative impact on culture and performance.
'If you've got no structure in how people are working, that just becomes a logistical nightmare,' she says. 'We're also hearing the employees within our clients saying that things have become too blurry, and if they haven't got that structure, then it all merges into one, and they want some separation between (work and life).'
But Winnie Jiang, an assistant professor of organisational behaviour at business school INSEAD, isn't convinced that this will be the end of flexible working arrangements.
'For some individuals, especially those who find unstructured or highly flexible working arrangements challenging to manage, returning to a 9 to 5 schedule can offer a renewed sense of clarity, rhythm, and purpose,' she says.
'However, for others who thrive in flexible, self-directed environments, the return to a 9 to 5 can feel limiting – more like a constraint than a support. For these individuals, the structure may feel like a cage, stifling the autonomy and adaptability that helped them flourish.'