I'm the junior, so I said yes the first two times and it got noticed, which honestly I liked. Now it's just assumed. I don't want a reputation for being difficult eight months into my first job, but I also haven't had a proper weekend since May. How do you push back at this level without it becoming a whole thing? Is there wording that lands softer than a flat no?
Eight months in and it's already the default is the part I'd focus on, because that only goes one direction.
The pushback that worked for me was scheduling-shaped rather than boundary-shaped: "I can do Saturday if we move X to Tuesday, otherwise I'd rather not." It makes the cost visible without turning it into a confrontation, and maybe half the time they decided the cost wasn't worth it.
And if the softer wording doesn't break the pattern, that's information about the team rather than about you. Mine didn't — turned out two people had left and nobody backfilled, so I quietly was the plan. Worth working out whether you're in a genuine crunch or a permanent staffing hole, because those two need pretty different responses.
The "just this once" framing is the tell — it's already a pattern, it just hasn't been named yet. What worked for me was turning it into a planning question instead of a willingness one: "I can't do Saturday, but if we look at it together Thursday I can have X done before the deadline." You're not refusing, you're moving it to what actually fits. Nobody's ever called that difficult.
