How to leave the office at 5pm

Over the twenty odd years that I’ve been in (allegedly gainful) employment the culture of hours worked has changed markedly. The 80’s with its booming yuppie years accelerated the acceptance, or should that be expectation, that you were in before the first light of dawn and if at all possible were the last person to leave at night. In many cases changing the mindset of management has been part and parcel of changing a business’s culture and through some very high profile law suits and heart attacks the business world finally realised that the work life balance of its employees was an integral part of its success or failure.

Talking to the number of candidates that we do it is plain that every morning they set a goal to leave the office in time to spend the evening hanging out with their family and friends. And every evening around 5 or 6pm, they look at the pile of work that’s still outstanding and realise it's not happening. Again!

But before you settle for another late night of takeaway’s and furious family members, think about this: many people actually do manage to have both fulfilling careers and fulfilling home lives. What do they know? From all of our interviews I've realised that these successful people adopt a few key tactics for shutting down their pc at the end of the day and leaving the office:

1. Realise you can leave before everything's done. In our rapid-fire age, email, requests for assistance, calls and meetings can fill all available space. If you aim to go home with a zero inbox, you will almost certainly never go home. Work will always be there and will take whatever time you give it. So give it less time. We all have a point of diminishing returns.

2. Split your hours. Leaving the office at 5pm doesn't mean you need to be done for the night. Try going home, spending time with your family or pursuing other personal projects, and then if you must work from home, fire up your laptop later in the evening for another hour or two. You'll probably be refreshed enough to solve problems that would have taken you until 8:30 if you'd stayed put.

3. Do a 4pm triage. If the to-do list for the day that you created first thing has been too ambitious, you'll probably realise, by mid-afternoon, that it can't all happen by 5pm. So at 4pm, go through and rank the most important tasks. If you knew that the electricity was going to go off in your office at 5pm, rendering more work impossible, what would you do before then? Do those things. Then stop. Pick up the to-do list again when you do your evening session or better still, the next morning. Who knows, maybe some of the problems will have solved themselves in the night!

If you have some better thoughts and ideas on how to ensure that you’re not stuck in the office until midnight, the team at Chesterton Gray is always keen to hear from you.