Are you ever properly ‘off duty‘? You may be in the office fron 9am until 5pm, but do you take your laptop home to ‘catch-up’ in the evening? Do you send the odd e-mail on your Blackberry when you go to bed?
It is easy to spot ‘work creep‘ – and I don’t mean the guy who everyone tries to avoid at the Christmas Party – in retrospect. To look back and say “yup, my work is pushing aside my personal life’. But how do you stop it happening in the first place? To be honest – I’m the last person you should ask…
At the moment I leave the house at 6.30am and don’t leave get home before 7pm – and I’d stay later if I didn’t rush home to put my son to bed. Then I make tea and work until 11pm when I usually go to bed. Non-office days usually mean I am on the road to a meeting by 6am, and get back after 7pm. This is in no way a hardcore schedule, and I suspect it is very similar to many people’s. What is interesting is how this has crept in – how exception has become routine.
I used to get in the office for around 8.30am, but found that if I got in a bit earlier then I had a bit of quite productive time before the phone started ringing and the e-mails started flowing. So it became 8.15am, then 8am, and earlier. And the same in the evenings. A prompt 5.30pm finish so I could get to a social engagement has morphed into posponing or cancelling social engagements because I “don’t finish work until after 6.30pm”. Getting the laptop out at home in the evening was always a sign of a peak time, but now I fire it up as part of the routine – I boot up, and then decide what to do rather than only booting up if there is something I need to do.
Throw into this mix the ever present Blackberry, and phone calls to the cell phone at all hours and you suddenly feel as if you are always at work. Even sat at home with a glass of wine, watching a film, you find your eye glancing the the Blackberry every few minutes to see if the LED is flashing red – an apt colour to show the work is saying “hello”.
It is not that I’m making work for myself – I genuinely have a lot to do, and obviously I am productive and efficient…. But surely there is a better way. One that allows me a little time every day when I am not on duty. I have written a list of 5 things I am planning on trying going forward – I’d love to hear your thoughts on these, and suggestions for other things:
- A separate home cell phone so I can turn the Blackberry/work cell phone off when I get home;
- Have a cut-off time, say 10pm when I must stop working every night;
- Put a time on when I am going to leave work so I am not ruching back to see my son;
- Set one night a week I am going to leave early to do something I want to do; and
- Monitor the number of hours I work each week to see if I am making progress.
And week 1 last week? 65 hours… room for improvement.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Maybe you should read (or listen to the audio book) “The 4 Hour Work Week” by Timothy Ferriss and combine his view on things with David Allen’s GTD (and Making It All Work).
Based on what I have read so far, let me comment on your 5 things:
1. Very good idea, but do you need that Blackberry anyway? Are things always that urgent that you need to read and respond to every email and call as soon as it comes in? Probably not. Make sure you create your boundaries and just don’t pick up the phone when “work” is calling after a certain hour.
2. 10pm? What about setting that to 8pm? It will force you to be much more selective and focus on the things that are really important, not that might be important.
3. Are you in a situation where you can easily work from home? Why not leave very early then? You won’t have to rush and you would be able to spend some time with your son as well instead of just putting him to bed. He will be happy and that will make you happy. After that, you can still do some work that really needed to be done (only the very important stuff that really can not wait till the day after), but stop doing that at the time you set in point 2 above.
4. First determine what you would like to do, then how much time you want to spend on it. If that is more that one night, then so be it and try to arrange “work” to fit in that schedule, instead of fitting your (social) life into your work.
5. Now that is a good one of course, but make sure that you are honest and that you don’t need to spend a lot of time on the administration of that. Otherwise you would just be replacing work with other work.
I am just a beginner in GTD and haven’t even read Making It All Work yet (just also bought the audio book, so that I can listen while commuting to work in the car, I unfortunately am not allowed to work from home yet). I am currently listening to the 4 hour work week (half way now). Tim Ferriss makes some very good points. By combining both as much as I can at the moment, I already feel more free that before. But as you, I am not “there” yet…
Good luck and keep us up to date on your progress.
With kind regards,
Sander Robijns
Owner of a one-man IT & management consulting company
Thanks for your tips Sander – they are much appreciated. Ferriss’s 4HWW is a good book, and I am trying to work out how I got this far off the rails!!!