If so you are not alone. According to as survey into the nations Long Hours by the Chartered Management Institute, the average British manager works the equivalent of 40 days a year in unpaid overtime.

More than 1,500 managers were questioned and 89% regularly worked more than their contracted hours. That is the same as 8 years ago.

So what happened to work life balance? The survey found the average manager worked 78 minutes over contract each day, that's equivalent to every manager putting in an extra 40 working days a year. After allowing for weekends, bank holidays and annual leave, this amounted to an extra two months of labour every year.

All this was good for the company but the downside was lower morale, poor health and declining productivity.

The survey found the sectors with the most severe long-hours culture were transport, where 52% of managers averaged at least two hours of unpaid overtime a day, and IT, at 45%. However, Long hours were least prevalent in central and local government, where only 27% of managers reported working 2 hours or more overtime. What a surprise!

Work your proper hours day! According to the TUC, nearly five million people in Britain regularly do unpaid overtime, giving their employers an average of £4,955 of free work a year.

On Friday it will stage a Work Your Proper Hours day to shame bosses into treating employees more fairly. They calculated that if employees worked all their unpaid overtime from the start of the year February 22 would be the first day they would be paid.

So who's to Blame? Only 2% of managers blamed their bosses for the long hours and 3% said they worked longer "to get ahead". About 54% said they stayed in the office just to keep up with the work, and one in three worked longer by choice.

What's the effect? These extra hours came at a cost. About 40% said it reduced morale. On a personal level, 68% said working over the contracted hours limited time for exercise and 48% said it stopped them developing new skills.

"Two questions need to be answered: why are employers ignoring the impact of long hours on the health and performance of their employees, and what responsibility are employees taking for how they manage themselves?" Jo Causon, the institute's marketing director

Who's working overtime? The survey found women managers are more able to control their workload - or feel obliged to do so because they take a larger share of family responsibilities. Only 16% of female managers worked more than 48 hours a week, compared with 35% of men. Only 3% of women managers worked more than 60 hours a week, compared with 7% of the men.

Managers in north-east England were the most likely to work over the contracted hours and those in London were the least likely.

Proportion of managers working two hours or more unpaid overtime per day :

UK average 36% Transport 52% IT 45% Education 39% Manufacturing 38% Insurance 38% Construction 34% Utilities 34% Tourism 33% Health/social care 32% Emergency services 31% Engineering 31%