It didn’t take me more than 6 months in my first job out of college to feel the pressures of working extra hours. Nobody appeared to work a 40 hour week. There was a stigma of slacking off if you’ were not in the plant for at least 9 hours a day.
The workaholic culture is unproductive. It tries to solve problems with long hours and brute force. We burn out, get sick, and contribute to a stressful work environment when we glorify excessively long workweeks.
Workaholics make the people who don’t stay late feel inadequate for ‘merely’ working reasonable hours.
Rework
Protect Your Time
You are responsible for protecting your time. Your company will always demand more from you, and it’s up to you to set boundaries. I’ve skipped lunches and canceled after-work plans to solve a problem that probably would have gone away on its own the next day by itself.
Of course, that’s not always the case. Sometimes matters with real urgency require extended hours. Sometimes the scope of your job requires longer hours than the standard eight. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves into believing that long hours are necessary for success.
Results Over Effort
Success is about the results you achieve. The time it takes you to achieve them is irrelevant. Instead of promoting the team member who sleeps in the office, why not celebrate our colleagues who go home on time because they’ve learned how to be more productive during an 8 hour day?
If you feel that working extra long hours is the only way you’re able to meet your work obligations, then I would implore you to start assessing your productivity. The first step toward improved productivity is an awareness of how your time is spent at work. Try logging your activity in an hour by hour journal.
Do you take an hour lunch? Try a half-hour instead. Do you routinely spend a half-hour chatting with colleagues over a morning coffee? Maybe you should take your morning coffee to a secluded conference room instead of your desk.
If you value your time outside of work and want to avoid falling into a workaholic culture, then you need to find tactics that help you improve your productivity.
The results you achieve, not the hours you worked, is what matters at the end of the day.
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