If you've ever wondered why you feel guilty when you're not working, I asked myself that question for years, usually with the laptop open at ten at night, and the answer turned out to have less to do with me than I'd assumed. Here's what I found, and the five questions that finally helped me close the laptop.
When my daughter was small, bath and bedtime was mine. I ring fenced it, I told my team about it, and I was clear with everyone that I wouldn't be in meetings then. It was the highlight of my day and I'd worked hard to protect it.
And then I'd get there, kneeling by the bath, and I wasn't in the room. I'd be looking into her eyes and somewhere behind them I was running through the actions from the last meeting, the deck for the next one, and the three hours I had to find that evening for everything still open on my to do list. She'd be humming to herself, playing with her bath toys, completely happy, and I was missing all of it.
I was with her and I wasn't, and I knew it. Once she was asleep I'd open the laptop and feel the pressure drop. I'd work through the list, get as far as I could, tick a few things off, and for a few minutes there'd be a clear sense of achievement. Done.
Then the guilt would land. The one hour I'd fenced off for her, and I hadn't been in the room for it. At bath time I'd felt guilty for stopping work. Now the work was done, I felt guilty for not stopping. Damned either way, and the only part of the evening that felt good was the twenty minutes after the laptop closed, before it caught up with me.
It wasn't only bath time. Sundays, a couple of emails to take the edge off Monday. Days I'd finished everything and was properly on top of it all, and the laptop would still be open again by ten. No time to completely switch off and take the break I needed.
Some of this is how I was raised. My family knew what it was like to lose everything, and you grow up learning to keep going, whatever it costs. It took coaching to get clarity on that. To understand what was mine and what wasn't, and how I'd been letting old situations colour new ones with an anxiety that came from a different time in my life.
The loop
Upbringing is part of it, but a lot of this is simply how we're wired as human beings. Our brains hate leaving things open. Every task I picked up during the day opened a little loop in my head, and until I'd dealt with it, part of me was still carrying it around, through dinner, through bath time, into bed. We're built to spot a pattern and finish it, and we get a small hit of dopamine every time we do, which is why a tune you know is satisfying. Your brain is already ahead of it, waiting for the next bit to land, and it's a big part of how addiction works too. Something feels uncomfortable, you do the thing that makes it stop, it stops, and you've just taught yourself to do it again next time.
For me, stopping felt bad and working made the feeling go away, so I kept working. Every time the guilt lifted, the loop got a little stronger. Psychologists call this kind of drive introjected motivation: an expectation that started outside you, from a boss, from society, from your family, that you've taken in so completely it now runs by itself. What kept mine running was guilt. I'd work late at night because I'd feel bad if I didn't, and somewhere it all got tangled up with my own sense of self worth.
Malissa Clark at the University of Georgia has spent her career studying people who can't stop, and she describes it as an inner compulsion with guilt or anxiety whenever you're not working. Her research also found no link at all between working like this and how well people actually perform in the long run. All those nights at the laptop after bedtime, and the only thing they were making me was tired.
Everyone has weeks, sometimes months, like the ones I'm describing, and most of us come out the other side fine. Some people do their best thinking at eleven at night, and I believe them. The problem is when it stops being something you chose and starts to feel like an invisible force pulling you back into the loop whether you want to be there or not.
Why it lands harder on women
Web Summit published its Gender in Tech report in October 2026, from more than a thousand women in its community. Four in ten had thought in the past year about cutting their hours, stepping back from leadership or leaving the industry. Among women aged 35 to 44 it was more than half. That's often the decade when caring kicks in, children, parents, sometimes both, and when you've reached the level where the job comes with increased levels of responsibility.
What the report doesn't say is why. From the women I coach, I'd say the reason is different for each of us. For me it was guilt, and in some of them it's anxiety, or shame, or a kind of drive that looks from the outside like someone being incredibly productive and feels from the inside a lot like burning out.
If it's guilt for you, you're not alone. A University of Toronto study asked just over a thousand workers how often they were contacted about work outside working hours, and then looked at how they felt about it. Men and women were equally good at juggling it, but the more often women were contacted, the more guilty and distressed they felt, and the men's guilt didn't move at all. The women felt guilty even when the contact hadn't got in the way of anything at home. Scott Schieman, who led the study, put it down to women still carrying different societal expectations about the line between work and home. We're still doing the lion's share of the caring and the running of the house, so when work reaches in, it lands on a day that was already full. That was me, kneeling by the bath, feeling guilty about something that technically hadn't happened.
For women in tech it's that combination, the guilt and an industry where nobody is ever done. There's always something to deliver, the next thing is queued before the last one's out, and the roadmap never empties. If you work in ecommerce, peak season doesn't need explaining. It's hard to put work down when there's always more of it, and nobody around you is putting theirs down either.
One woman I coach heads up a digital team at a fintech and is caring for someone at home, so her loop never closes. Caring has no end of day and the backlog is still there in the morning. What's made the difference for her is two things. Getting clear on why she was running so hard in the first place, and finding changes she could actually make in the life she has. For her that's one thing a day she can finish properly, twenty minutes on something she's chosen, so at least one loop shuts before she sleeps. The research on recovering from work points to the same few things again and again: time where your head is somewhere else, time you chose yourself, and the small satisfaction of completing something that has nothing to do with your job. A chapter of a book, a walk outside, a workout in the middle of the day, a lunch eaten away from the desk.
Where the time went
In theory this is the moment in history when it all gets easier. AI has arrived, we're more efficient than we've ever been, and there are agents working away in the background for us while we sleep. Nights like the ones I've described should be a distant memory. But from what I'm seeing in my own work and in the women I coach, they aren't.
Researchers at UC Berkeley spent eight months inside a 200 person tech company that had given everyone broad access to the latest generative AI tools, paid for and ready to go, the kind of setup that's supposed to take the grind out of the day and hand people their time back. You'd expect people to finish on time, with more evenings off. Instead, people ended up working longer hours. They worked faster, took on more and worked later, often without being asked. Prompts over lunch, before meetings, in the evening, until the natural pauses in the day had gone. And the extra effort became the new normal.
Nobody at that company was told to work longer. They did it because the culture of the company made that the normal thing to do. People are calling for right to disconnect laws and for rules around AI, so that what happened in that company doesn't become what happens everywhere. I'm for all of it. But a law can't make a team feel finished at six. The company culture does that, and talking about it isn't enough. People have to see it in action.
Deloitte surveyed 5,000 working women and found a small group of employers, around one in twenty, that it calls gender equality leaders. These are companies where women said the culture genuinely supported their careers and their lives outside work, and where taking them up on it, leaving on time, working flexibly, didn't count against them. For me, reading those together, the common thread is having a say, in how you work and when you stop, and knowing it won't be held against you. Give women real flexibility over when and how they work, and back them when they use it, and the guilt has a lot less to hold on to.
Zurich UK is a good example. In 2019 it became the first company in the UK to advertise every job, senior roles included, as open to part time, job share or flexible working by default, and a manager who wanted a role to be full time only had to make the case for it. The person applying got to choose, and Zurich had put that in writing. Within a year, applications from women were up 16%, applications from women for senior roles were up by a fifth, and a third more women were hired into senior roles. Steve Collinson, Zurich's head of HR at the time, said the results had come "simply by adding six words to our job adverts".
Where I've got to
Understanding what was driving me turned out to be the easy part. Knowing why I was at the laptop at ten didn't close it. What changed things was working out what I could actually affect. The industry and the roadmap weren't mine to change. What I did at six o'clock was, and so was what my team saw me do. So I started leaving loudly. I said when I was logging off and why, and I didn't come back for the ad hoc messages. I stopped sending emails after six, because the moment I sent one, everyone under me learned the real rules. I was clear about what the actual hours were, and just as clear that the team had the same flexibility I was taking for myself, and I backed them when they used it. And I kept an eye on the people who never stopped, because I'd been that person. Someone has to go first on this, and if you lead a team, it's you.
The bigger shift for me was accepting that it is never going to be finished. Not this week, and not after peak. Once I stopped waiting for finished, the question changed. It stopped being 'how do I get it all done?' and became 'how do I protect the time that matters while it isn't done?'
That question, and a handful of others that grew out of it, are the ones I still use every week, because it's so easy to get pulled back in. I ask them when I catch myself at the laptop at ten at night, or when a message lands at seven asking for one quick thing.
If I say yes to this, what am I saying no to?
Is it sustainable given what the month ahead looks like?
Is the yes coming from enthusiasm or from fear of letting someone down?
Would I choose it again in the morning?
And the one underneath all of them: is this even mine?
If you catch yourself at the laptop late this week, try them.
One night a while ago, during bath time, I realised I'd been looking at my daughter the whole time, properly, with no list running behind my eyes and nothing waiting for me once she'd gone down. It took me a long time to get here, but I'm here now. Bath and bedtime these days mostly involves negotiating how much of the bath water stays in the bath, and getting her out before she turns into a full raisin.
If you've read this and recognised more of yourself than you'd like, and you'd like to look at doing things differently, that's what I do with the women I coach. You can book a free intro call here.
