How to Stop Working and Go Home at Night
Many of us are anxious to pack up and head home at the end of a long day at work: we count down the hours, and as soon as our shift ends, we go out the door. For others, it’s the stigma of leaving on time, or worse, it’s hard for us to force ourselves to leave the office, whether we love our job or not. Here are some ways to break the cycle of late work and regain your evenings and sanity.
Blast From The Past is a weekly feature on Lifehacker in which we bring old but still relevant posts to life for your reading and hacking enjoyment. This week we remind you to go home.
You may not have the willpower to just leave on time at the end of each day, you may feel like you need to stay late, or maybe you are on fire or your coworkers are still there. However, there are ways to talk yourself into leaving. Photo by Evan Jackson .
Make grooming worth your time
If you give yourself an incentive (or, conversely, punishment) to leave the office on time, you may be tricked into ending work every day at the same time. It may not get to the point of why you get lost in your job or feel like you need to work late, but it does give you a reason to get out of the office on time. Here are some suggestions:
Have a family member call you every day. If one of your main concerns about working late often is that you are wasting time with your spouse, partner, friends, or kids, one great way to bring that shock back into reality is to have one of them call you when you time to go home. You will need to sit down and discuss this with your family, and you are directing your family to make you come home every night, but that is good if they achieve their desired goal. Discuss this with them and ask them for help.
One of my former work colleagues used to get a call from his wife or daughter when they knew he had to pack up to go home. It wasn’t enough to cook dinner when he got home, he needed a little more motivation to actually stop working and leave the office. Hearing his daughter’s voice at the end of the day was motivation enough to make him want to go home and see her. Alternatively, ask your friends to call or send an SMS to remind you to leave the office or meet you after work. Photo by: traaf .
Schedule a class every day right after work. Whether you’re looking to get in shape, go to yoga classes, or volunteer with a local charity, make sure you sign up for activities that will force you to leave your office at your regular times every day – a great way to stay. active, do something with yourself outside the office and give yourself the incentive to leave the office on time every day.
For some people, a gym membership is enough so that they don’t waste the money they spend every month and don’t leave the office and go to the gym every day. Others require a little more, like meeting a friend at the gym at the same time every day, or signing up for a sports league or volunteer shift that starts when you need to pack and leave the office. at the end of the day if you want to meet your next commitment on time. Photo by Ed Yurdon .
Customize your workflow to make quitting easy
External influences may not always help you. Your friends may need to cancel your regular gym appointment so you don’t have to work late all the time if you don’t have a spouse or family at home waiting for you. If you’d rather solve the problem yourself, here are some helpful tips.
Set your alarm. This is not easy for most people, but it is a good way to get started. If you’re the type of person who just gets lost in their work and forgets to look at the clock to find out when it’s time to go home, let the clock come to you. You can use one of the many break timer apps we’ve covered here, like Break Timer or Breaker , or any old alarm clock app on your phone or computer to go off when it’s time for you to go home for the night. You might even want to set several alarms – one for when you need to pack, another for when you really need to pack, one for when you should head to your car, and so on. Don’t let yourself ignore just one thing, because chances are you will.
This serves the same function as a friend or family member calling you when it’s time to go home during the day, but it doesn’t depend on anyone’s goodwill at work. Just make sure you turn on the alarm or notification method: it’s too easy to get used to the same alarm and end up ignoring it or turning it off because it’s more annoying than helpful. In my last job, I used our cleaners as a kind of alarm clock: they always came to clean my part of the building at the same time every night, and when they showed up, I knew it was time to pack up and leave. In the end, they got the point and greeted me when they arrived and noted how late I was working. Even this short conversation shook me out of the head-down mentality and reminded me that it was time for me to go home. Photo by Digitpedia Com .
Schedule a daily end-of-day review of tasks. The concept of a daily (and weekly) review is important in the GTD productivity system. We’ve discussed various productivity techniques before, but even if you don’t understand all the features of GTD, the beauty of the review process is that it forces you to find a stopping point where you can take a break between ending one work day and starting another. That way, you can stop, mark what you finished today, and then set up what you want to do tomorrow morning first.
In addition to forcing you to close the store at the end of the day before heading home, you also get the opportunity to keep a work diary that you can use to track your progress and tell your boss what you have been working on and how far you are. advanced. Plus, you’ll be more productive in the long run because you set yourself up for an easy start the next morning. You can immediately start completing the tasks you left the night before.
Learn to say no. For some of us, it’s not just overtime, it’s about taking on too much work that requires us to work those long hours. We discussed how important it is to say no , but the goal of saying no has always been to help you succeed at what you already had on your plate, not just sit back and do less work. If you find it difficult to leave the office at the end of the day because you have too much work to do, it might be time to speak with your manager about your priorities.
Most managers don’t mind talking to you like this if you frame it as if you want to be successful in your core responsibilities and what your boss considers your top priorities. Tell them that as a result of any additional projects – or new ones that they want you to take on – you are worried that your already 12-14 hour workdays will stretch to 16, and you are afraid of something important. … will be left behind. This is a healthy conversation, and your manager will probably be happy that you are conducting it now, and not after you have left out something important. Photo by Horia Varlan.
Solving a psychological problem
All of these tips will help if you’re having trouble keeping track of your time, or if your problem is that you’re so passionate about your work that you want to make sure it’s done right, early, or to perfection. However, if the problem gets worse, you can quickly revert to old habits or just take work home with you and work from there. Here are some ways to approach the thinking side of the problem, not just the functional one.
Start small and build up. You are not going to go from working from 7 am to 9 pm every day to your regular schedule from 7 am to 3 pm at night. Instead of aiming to leave at 3 p.m. when your coworkers (or worse, your boss) may have gotten used to finding you at 5 p.m., try pushing back your schedule a couple of days a week so that your coworkers and your brain got used to this idea. This will help you start registering earlier times as “end of the day” and make it easier to apply other tools and methods.
Better yet, check with your boss to see if they are willing to reschedule your schedule to a more convenient time for you. If you leave your office at 9:00 pm every night, you might want to start arriving at work at 11:00 am or noon, or at least later than 7:00 am every morning if your job allows. Photo by Matt Seppings .
Make a deal with yourself, your family, or the world. Any meaningful change you want to make will, of course, start with you, but if you are the type of person who is more motivated to make long-term change, if others are looking at you, make a contract with people who will be able to see. whether you stick with it is a good idea.
Tell your Facebook friends that you’re trying to get out early and spend more time with your family or going to the gym. Tell your family what you want to do and get their support. Don’t keep your goals to yourself. If you’re so ingrained in a bad habit, you might regularly disappoint yourself, but you probably don’t want to disappoint your Twitter followers, Facebook friends, or family.
Don’t get angry with yourself when you fail. You will not always be successful, and this is a process that takes time. When you do go back to your old habits and find yourself working late despite missing your friend at the gym, quitting your weekly softball game, and turning off the alarm, don’t pout all the way home feeling sorry for yourself. Remember that tomorrow will be another day and another chance to get it right, and redouble your efforts.
In my last job, I struggled with this constantly. I started to miss my daily workouts and gain weight because I was busy in the office answering emails and solving problems faced by people who went home hours ago. Part of what helped me get back in line was the knowledge that if the people I sat at my desk emailed to at 8 p.m. were at home with their families and thought the problem might wait until the next morning, then I could wait too.
It doesn’t work for everyone, but it definitely helps. Combined with the fact that I saw each new work day as a new opportunity to get things right and get out on time for a workout, I began to gradually put the end of the day back, hour after hour, until I left at the right time. Photo by tup wanders .
Get professional help. Finally, if you think that the problem is really getting to addiction, that it is already negatively affecting both your professional and personal life, you may be showing signs of workaholicism . Keep in mind that workaholics are not always people who enjoy their job, or people who really do a good job at their job.
Get the opinions of people you trust, talk to a professional who can help, or consider reaching out to anonymous workaholics who can help you figure out if you just need help managing your work-life balance or if you have there are many problems. a more serious problem.
Understand that it takes time
As with any behavior change, getting up and leaving the office is something that takes time. At best, you’ll learn to work smarter, not harder, so you don’t have to stay outside of office hours to get the job done. However, because working late is often due to many external factors, it can be difficult to deal with all of them at once. Start with the ones you control, namely yourself, and then work through your office or manager’s perception of your work habits as needed.
With time and a little help from those closest to you, you will have more hours a day for what you want to do, for your home projects and to spend time with friends, family or, God forbid, have a social life. … Your employer can probably do without you at all; they can definitely survive if you work a normal working day. On the other hand, you may be out of luck if you don’t find time for yourself. Finally, try to remember that you work to live, not live to work.