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.
