Permission to Leave Work On Time - Granted
By Tana M. Mann Easton, Lead Efficiency Engineer
One of my favorite podcasts is Before Breakfast with Laura Vanderkam. Laura is an author and podcaster who has made a career out of studying how people actually spend their time and optimizing those minutes. One of her podcast episodes is titled “Leave work on time, guilt-free,” and that episode caught my attention because it gave me permission to continue to work hard for my job within my pre-established start and end times each day.
I worked in the financial industry for 14 years. My first four years were in New York City. If you were asked to name a high-pressure work environment, a financial job in NYC would probably be at the top of a lot of people’s hypothetical lists. Many of my colleagues would work past closing time pretty consistently. There were usually three reasons why this would happen. The first reason is that some people were night owls, and they felt they did their best work at night. They’d typically come in later in the morning, and they were usually young and single. They liked being at the office when it was quiet at night, and I don’t see anything wrong with that arrangement if someone is consciously choosing it.
The second reason some of my colleagues worked past closing time was because they felt it got them extra credit with management. Sometimes managers would be swayed by an employee who occupied their chair more time than other employees even if that time didn’t actually result in higher work output. I’ve also seen working overtime backfire though. If managers see that you’re staying late consistently but you’re not on top of all of your work or taking extra work to do during those extra hours, they sometimes view the employee as ineffectual and wonder why they’re staying late if they’re not overperforming.
The third reason some of my colleagues worked late was because they had more work than they could get done during normal working hours. However, a large portion of those employees didn’t really have any system for staying on top of their work. Their system was often – who is currently yelling at me or angry with me? Whoever was yelling or angry would get their attention, and they would do that work. In the absence of anyone scolding them, their next question was – what just came into my inbox? And those two factors were their entire system all day every day. There’s no way to know what you need to do each day and when you’re finished if that’s your system for accomplishing your daily tasks. However, if you have a system (like the one we teach!), you know what your most important objectives are for the day, and you know when you’re finished with them. The system I use and teach helped me to leave on time every single day of my 14 years in finance. The number of people that I supported started at 3, then became 5, then ballooned to 10, and I was still able to plug all of my work into the system that we teach and leave on time every day.
I’ve always valued my time outside of work as equal to or more important than my time at work. I do my job, and I do it well during the hours I’m supposed to be there. But then I turn work off, and I live my personal life just as well. There are people like me and Laura Vanderkam who leave work on time and prosper. If you feel like you need more personal time, maybe it’s time for you to make your plan to leave work on time.
If you or your team would like to sign up for our 2 hour Balance and Productivity training to instantly double your meaningful output and find the feeling of lasting flow and optimized work life balance, please email me at tana@focustoevolve.com and say hello!
Sincerely Yours,
Focus to Evolve Team