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Maintaining a Work/Life Balance
It's a good thing to love your job, and a good thing to be dedicated to your work, but sometimes you find work leaking into the rest of your life and taking up time and energy that you meant to spend on your friends and family and on yourself. Many companies are waking up to the idea that sending employees home with work every night causes a lot of job stress, and is not a good long term investment in employee productivity. But if you're in a situation where your work is taking over, I can help minimize the problem.
You're Not Imagining It
If you're thinking that you're just making this up, that it's not really that big a problem, think again. Companies routinely assign employees more work than they can finish in an eight hour day, in the name of "productivity." So if you're taking home work more than once a week, or if you're working more than one weekend a month, then something is out of balance.
It's Not Your Fault
Don't get on the guilt train about this; don't start thinking, "If only I skipped lunch I could get all this finished before I leave." The work will always absorb all the time you can give it, plus an additional ten percent. So the fact that you're taking home a briefcase full of work, or going in every Saturday, isn't a judgement on you, and you should feel angry rather than guilty.
It Won't Go Away On It's Own
Most bosses don't give you more than you can handle because they're evil people - they are also under pressure to accomplish more and more work with fewer and fewer workers, and all they can do is to push the problem along. So as long as you do nothing about it, your the amount of energy you devote to your job and to the rest of your life will continue to get further and further out of balance.
What You Can Do
I'm not going to tell you to just "Refuse to take on more work than you can handle in a day." We both know that, in today's business world, you have to carry your share of the work overload. But you can exert some control on the imbalance. For instance:
- You can set limits on when the boss can call you at home: not during meal times or at bedtime.
- You can agree on the kind of work that you take home: drafts to review but not heavy writing jobs.
- You can make sure that the overload is being spread fairly among all your colleagues.