Work-Life Balance Strategy: Leave Work On Time

The erroneous notion of staying longer

One of the worst time traps that you can fall into is believing that by working a little longer, or by taking work home on the weekend, you can finally "catch up." This fallacy will keep you perpetually chasing the clock for the rest of your career, maybe even the rest of your life. 

When you take work home or work a little longer at the office on a perpetual basis, these actions become the norm. Soon, you're taking another thirty or forty pages of reading material home at night as if this is SIMPLY THE WAY IT IS. 

On occasion it makes sense to take work home from the office; all career achievers do. During specific campaigns like the launch of a new business, product, or service; when you change jobs; or approaching a significant event, it makes sense to bone up and spend a few extra hours at work. 

However, when you consistently work longer hours or take work home from the office you begin to forget what it's like to have a free week-night or, eventually, a free weekend. In observing the working styles of some of the most successful people in America – multimillionaires, best-selling authors, high-powered corporate executives, association leaders, top-level government officials, educators – people from all walks of life, I've found that the most successful maintain a healthy balance between their work and home life. 

Your key to reducing the time pressure you feel is in learning that you don't need to stay longer. Indeed, to reclaim your day, you cannot stay longer. Your quest is to accomplish what you seek to accomplish within the eight or nine-hour workday.

Suppose your workday is 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. with an hour for lunch – yielding a total of eight working hours. Study after study shows that most people are only working sixty percent of those eight hours. Even in this downsizing era, most people work a daily average of only four hours and forty-eight minutes on the tasks, responsibilities, and activities that they were hired to perform (Notable exceptions include the self-employed and the fanatically driven).

Even if you aren't among those that dawdle or goof off forty percent of the day, it's unlikely that you work eight solid hours. Many factors inhibit your inclination to work a solid eight hours every day:

Eight-hour workdays, 250 days a year, yields a work year of 2,000 hours. Can you accomplish in 2,000 hours the tasks you were hired for? Yes! Two thousand hours, 200 hours, eight hours, even one hour, is a great deal of time – if you have the mind-set, the quiet, and the tools.

Take away any of these crucial elements – coming to work exhausted, tackling projects without the necessary resources, getting interrupted, or being mentally unprepared to give your all – and one hour, eight hours, 200 hours, 2,000 hours, or more, won't be sufficient for you to do your work.