Is overtime good or bad?

One of the last projects I participated in made me think a little about how to do overtime and how to do it effectively.

I'm taking into consideration that every hour of work more than your ordinary working day is understood as overtime.

As a programmer, it's not very difficult for projects to require more than a "common" work day for some deliveries or even deadlines. But are these overtime hours being smart and planned? I believe that if you tried to perform a task in 8 hours but needed 12 hours. Those extra hours were not expected and this can be very costly at the end of each step.

I do not want this article to get into the productivity issue of working a lot of hours, where I want to get is that if you're going to do more hours than usual, do to deliver more than you would deliver at a normal time and not for correct problems generated during a task of less complexity.

Of course, this's not a permanent situation and to do this we have to improve our plans and especially when we want to do overtime.

I hope I haven't been too confused and I'm open to discussion.

Thank you very much,

Ramon Ferreira