How to Leave Work at Work
hbr.org
hbr.org
Twice I'd had a 'bad' friday, only to have solutions reveal themselves while I was gardening over the weekend. I realised it did me no harm that my mind strayed to work while gardening, and in fact I was glad of it. So I made a decision to abandon attempts at erecting artificial structure, and quickly realised that trying to impose separations had caused more stress than it resolved.
I found it liberating to stop trying to 'leave work at work', and to not be upset if my thoughts stray to work when I 'should' be off the clock. In return, I stopped trying to block out the rest of my life from my home office. I enjoy a busy life with various community responsibilities and being able to give some attention to these (and family) during 'work hours' is something I value highly. In return I'm happy to perform work activities outside office hours as it suits.
I understand why this won't work for everyone, but for me, trying to set boundaries - which many people had told me was the way to maintain balance - was counter-effective. If anyone is having trouble setting boundaries; consider not.
My solution for creating boundaries is not to banish wrong-think at wrong times, but to simply prioritize "my time" versus "company time". If I am on company time, that hobby idea gets jotted down for after-hours research. But after I am off the clock, my personal interests get my attention and work can wait, or gets just a quick notation so that I can refocus on my own priority.
Interestingly working full-time again after a stint of contracting has made this easier. When I was doing mostly remote contracting, it was harder to separate -- the urge to generate billable hours made it hard to enjoy my free time. Now that I have FTE -- my weekends are mine, damn it.
Time boundaries are notoriously difficult to use well without a coercive force dragging you forward. For folks with executive function difficulties that often turns into the procrastination/anxiety brew that makes them seek out pharmacutical help. But time is often sought after first because it has a seductive simplicity: First you do this for an hour, then you do that...except that you overrun one and have oodles of time leftover for the other.
Place boundaries, on the other hand, work relatively well for me. In that instance the work literally is wherever you left it, and going about your day means checking off a visit to different places. The places can be small: Absolute distance and volume aren't really the issue so much as the perception of travel, and organization emerges from this as a matter of ergonomics. Computers actually make place organization harder because they tend to cram everything together. It takes active resistance.
Social boundaries hold a kind of cross between time and place: Checking in with a person can be challenging if you have to actively enter their space, but easy if you agreed to show up at a common place and time.
Turns out it's really just different strokes for different folks and everyone's inner world operates in a way that they absolutely require certain things and absolutely should avoid certain others. It's just different for everyone.
I worked out I needed to stop listening to other peoples advice before I became aware of any executive dysfunction, because I realized that other people's advice barely matched up with my personal experience and was largely useless, so I should simply stick to trying things and seeing what works for me vs what doesn't.
I get the feeling the range of inner world's is much more vast and varied than people truly realize. Wish there was a good way to calibrate for that.
These didn't come to me as easily when I was "on the clock" to get out of bed and be somewhere at a specific time. (sometimes, in the shower)
It does mean I have to have my phone near the bed to rapidly record these small insights that come to me.
Before covid, I was reaching my office around 7am and most of my team would drift in around 10am - and I’d be leaving around 4pm... Now that I’ve been working from home I still start at 7am but it’s much easier to take a multi-hour break (usually spent on some hobbies or chores, or just chilling) and then go back to work later on for a couple more hours. So I’m getting more sleep and putting more work hours in, but getting a lot more personal projects done. And yes, it feels liberating, so I guess I’m lucky. (And very lucky to have a great manager at work!).
I'm not a regular hours kind of guy. I want to put in a couple hours at 2 am. I want to sleep in. I'd like to go for a couple hour walk in the afternoon. Maybe chores or something personal was stressing me out that needed to be taken care.
Once I came to terms with just letting the two blend together, so much stressed came off my shoulders. Now, I'm available 9-5 on my cell if the team needs to chat -- but I get tickets cleared out when the I'm at peak motivation for that kind of work.
I'm far more productive then when I was trying to force myself to slog through unproductive afternoons. I got the hours in, but not the work. Now, I feel much more balanced between work and personal affairs.
If I have so much work that I am drowning and people are looking for me to do more and more and more.....
that means my manager failed their Real Time Strategy Game and they need another worker at my level. Maybe that's because the next manager up failed their game, etc etc.
But it doesn't matter why.
I do 9-5. And I go home. That is the employment contract. That is what I do.
I try to make good on my 9-5 so my own self worth is fine. But I only do my job.
One environment I interact with are all hypercompetitive and I probably look like an idiot to some of leadership because I refuse to work 60 hour work weeks like some of them grind away. If they decide to reduce or remove my services, life goes on, but we're somehow rolling back on labor's mentality about work life balance and being eaten alive by structures in place designed to force us to compete for the lowest rates (by adjusting either work or time in some way, shape, or form).
I am obviously not Startup material! :-P I am not management material. I am not an entrepreneur par excellence. I won't die rich.
But I hope to leave the world a better place than it would've been without me, even if only a little bit.
And enjoy it in the meantime.
You can argue the humanist point of view to not burn people out or the business point of view that happy, well rested people produce better work over the long term. There's tons of data to back it up if you want to go that route as well.
I've found you can frame the productive discussion beyond hours in the office by emphasising that we work hard and use the time outside work to be refreshed enough to do it consistently month over month, year over year.
It said there are 7 ways to deal with impeding deadlines, and only 4 of them are available to the people in the trenches. The other 3 are available to managers.
They are:
- extending the deadline
- assigning more people to the project
- changing the scope of the project (requirements)
Looks helpful.
This pays off in two ways - firstly I finish work when I planned to instead of "just five more minutes", which inevitably spins off into a series of open ended diversions. Secondly, it means I can start the next day with something I can sink in to, avoiding the feeling of procrastination and guilt that comes along with that, ultimately resulting in working later to pay back that lost time.
Try to stop on a bug or error.
Same reasoning you cited with a bonus: when you come back in the morning, you'll have an error message to help you quickly pick up where you left off.
Of course, the optimal plan at that point could easily be for you (as it was for me) to leave the situation, but even so -- at least it makes that clearer!
My biggest problem is just having work thoughts come up, in the shower, eating dinner, on the commute, falling asleep. One time i was on vacation on the other side of the world and out of nowhere i suddenly realized I knew how to handle some problem i was having at work. I wouldn't get back to it for a week, i would need to take notes on my aha moment...
I remember an interview with David Allen of GTD, and he was asked what he had planned for the afternoon, and he said, “I don’t know. I’ll find out then”. At the time, I hadn’t used GTD much, and I thought this was tongue in cheek. Years later I realized he was dead serious.
The big win of GTD (or similar) is not a Swiss Army knife of task management. The big win is returning mental bandwidth to you.
Edit: Getting Things Done (GTD) for anyone unaware like me.
Pro writing tip: first write out the words of an acronym before defining it like I did above or the reader will be confused.
On the other hand when I'm relaxed and enjoying free thought, I sometimes can't help but use some of that freetime to think through work problems to reduce work stress. I suppose if my personal time was spent with high cognative load as well, it would be a fair trade off, but after working at high cognative function 40+ hours a week, my personal time tries to be as mentally relaxing as possible.
At 5-6PM, I'll shutdown the laptop and put it away, out of sight, and get back into "home clothes". The acts, despite its placebo effect, helps immensely in switching to home mode.
Plus, it’s a super easy thing to try for a few weeks to see if it works for you.
If you want to keep your balance in life, it is helpful to adhere to certain regular routines and habits. There is in fact a musical about this, and the challenges of doing so:
- In a world with other people.
- While also allowing yourself and others the life-autonomy to pursue their happiness.
I often feel like if I'm not "working" (IE; actually producing something) then I'm somehow cheating the company. This doesn't apply for the simple "trial-and-error" stuff that kind of comes as a part of the job, but sitting down to read a book or watch some tutorials etc; I could never imagine doing in the office.
But this _is_ work according to my long-term partner.
No one on the team did know about that, no one believed my fix could work (a one line for a bug we investigated on and off for months). It did. I had read a computer security article about how row hammer can be used to gain privilege or something and made the connection.
During my yearly evaluation, I mentionned it as the most impact that year. I was nearly laughed at. This bug precluded the product from functioning more than a few minutes, and we targeted at least several hours without any glitch. No one noticed that without me in the team, the product was dead for a few more month at least.
I left a year later. The company is dead now.
Computers are my hobby, not just my job, so I feel that I research and experiment in my own time. But I'm reasonably happy to experiment at work, in short doses.
I also think that it's healthier to strive for setting+hitting ambitious outcomes, and thinking less about literal hours that you're working.
(My blog co-author wrote a post about a very closely related topic - the TLDR is that it's really a manager's job to look for ways to train their team by aligning learning areas with what the business needs. Without that alignment, you'll always have the tension that you called out where it can feel like you're not doing "real work" while learning: https://staysaasy.com/management/2020/08/01/Growth-Paths.htm...)
But to your broader point, if I need to step back to do some learning for a work task/presentation/etc. I absolutely consider that to be on the clock.
One of the best things that I did (which was triggered for other reasons) was to remove my work email from my smartphone. When you only have a laptop to get work done and cannot get emails or chat on the device you carry or check throughout your waking hours, the matter of leaving work at work becomes a lot easier. Shutdown your work laptop around a specific hour everyday and you're (mostly) free.
If you're not compelled, I would strongly recommend doing the same. This doesn't mean that you will not work after working hours (there may be times when it's required), but you certainly won't be distracted by notifications and slipping into work unnecessarily when it's clearly not urgent. If you do not have a work provided smartphone and are using your personal device, then this is also safer for you since MDM policies are applied even on employee-owned devices and (depending on the OS) give a lot of information about your device/apps/usage and control on the device to your employer. I don't see any reason why I should do that with any employer.
Once you stop sending emails or responding to emails at odd hours (meaning, post normal working hours), others will usually get the hint and stop treating email with the same urgency as phone calls.
Step 1: Define “After Hours”
Step 2: Have Mental Clarity
Step 3: Communicate with Your Colleagues
Step 4: Get Work Done at Work
And I will add my own personal experience:
Step 5: Realize you (probably) work a B.S. job[1].
I realized I was dedicating my precious life to the pursuit of profit for people at the very top to the detriment of my own well being. If my job disappeared tomorrow, would society be negatively impacted in any meaningful way? No, in fact it might even improve. Realizing this, I just stopped caring about expectations to sacrifice any more time than necessary to my job.
[1] https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/06/bullshit-jobs-david-graeb...
IMHO for many tech companies, "After Hours" has come to not exist for many employees, especially in engineering. I work with teams in India and Europe; since Covid there's been a serious expansion of meetings with these teams, so 7am, 6:30 am meetings, 9pm meetings, and so on.
For a little while, it was fine, I am a helpful person by nature. But after two months or so, I decided this was not being treated as temporary, so started simply declining. It is not without political cost to do so. Being able to decline is a privileged position, and definitely there are many people in the company who don't think they have that option. Obviously that's wrong, but it has been so easy for many companies to impose this on their exempt workforce that I think turning back the dial will be a struggle.
Very important to realize this. Also, from my experience if you just work 35 or 40 hours per week but use this time to really work, you are already way more productive than most people.
Sounds obvious as hell, but it's true - some professions, even in tech, come with the benefit that you're not allowed to bring your work home.
Some people will probably say "but that just makes you stay longer at work", well - yes and no. Completely depends on your work guidelines. Some workplaces have stringent rules, and will practically shoo you home/refuse you OT if you work too much OT.
Does anyone have any advice, beyond what this article mentions?
I’ve also found making a list of things I want to do tomorrow and writing them down helps me not have those panic wake ups in the first place.