How to Stop Working at a Fixed Time

This week’s question is all about balance and how to combine a busy professional life with an active personal life. 

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Episode 197 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 197 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Do you feel sometimes your work is taking over your life? You’re not alone. Many people are feeling this and with the sudden move towards working more from home, it likely feels almost impossible to put barriers between your professional and personal life. 

This week, I will share with you some strategies you can use to help bring a little more balance into your life. 

Before we get to the question and answer if you want to learn more about time management and productivity I have a YouTube channel that shares tips and strategies to help you get the most out of tools like Todoist and Evernote as well as many of Apple’s productivity apps. 

The link to my channel is, as usual, in the show notes.

Okay, time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Claire. Claire asks: Hi Carl, my company started a work from home policy last year because of the pandemic and have now decided to move to a hybrid policy. We should work from home three days a week and go to the office on two. The problem I have is when I am at home, I find it difficult to stop working in the evening. Do you have any tips to help me keep a more balanced day when I work from home? 

Hi Claire, thank you for your question. 

I think this has been a challenge for many people over the last eighteen months or so. We were perfectly happy living a Monday to Friday life where we commuted every day, worked in a fixed location and then came home at the end of the day. It was easy to differentiate when we were working and when we were not. Now, with us starting and ending our work in the same place it is much more difficult to do so. 

Now the first thing I would recommend is to stop thinking in terms of 9 ‘till 5 work hours. While this may seem somewhat counterintuitive, it is this area where I feel most people are struggling. The biggest problem with thinking that you must be always working between set hours each day is you soon start to feel you are under house arrest. This is not a great mindset to be working under. 

We need to enjoy our work, not hate it. If you allow yourself greater freedom to roam about you are going to find yourself feeling more at ease working from home. For instance. You may begin your day by clearing your actionable email. Well, you don’t necessarily need to do that from your computer. Those quick emails could be done on your phone, so you could pop outside on a nice day and spend the first thirty minutes of the day getting some fresh air. 

We have the technology to allow us to be moving around. We can respond to Slack messages and emails from mobile devices, and for many, your meetings may be done without video, and so you can do the call almost anywhere. Don’t feel you must be sat at your desk all day. Get up, move around and do your work in the best environment.

Another way we restrict ourselves is by feeling we must do our work during the day. This may be true. You might be in the unfortunate position of having a boss who is monitoring you all day. But for the majority of you who don’t have this, be more flexible with your working time. 

For instance, if your kids come home from school around 4pm stop for an hour and play with your kids. Then when they settle down in the evening (hopefully they do) you can go back and do an hour of work in the evening. 

Now I’ve found that breaking off in an afternoon to take a nap or do exercise helps me be more productive. I usually exercise around 4pm, but I also go back to my home office around 7:30pm for an hour to do a little more work. Sometimes, I begin the day at 10am rather than 9am and spend that first hour taking a walk with my wife and dog. 

One of the great things about this move away from working full-time in an office is managers are being forced to focus less on hours worked and more on work produced—which of course is a far better metric anyway. So hours sat in front of a screen doing nothing important can be replaced with something far more regenerative and that means when you are in front of your computer screen you are going to be more effective.

One of the difficulties many people faced when they had to work in an office all day was distractions. If it wasn’t your boss asking you questions all day or colleagues interrupting you with gossip, it was the noise and movement all around you that prevented you from being able to focus on your work. 

Working from home means you can close the door and do sessions of focused work without all that background noise and interruptions. The thing to remember is your brain is not a machine it needs breaks, so use your calendar and schedule out periods of focused work in between other jobs you may have to do.

For instance. Today, I had a call from 7:30am to 8:30am. Then I took my wife to her dance studio. I returned home around 9:00am and had two hours until my next call at 11am. Those two hours were a great opportunity to do some focused work. 

Once my calls were over around 1:00pm, I picked my wife up from her studio and we had lunch together. Returning home around 2:30, I did another 90 minutes of focused work before exercise. Finally between 5pm and 6pm I responded to my email and messages. 

If you total up the number of hours I did work today, it was seven and a half hours, yet I managed to have lunch with my wife, exercise and not be confined to a single room all day. 

I was at my desk when it mattered—for the video calls, I was able to do three and a half hours of focused work and respond to all my messages without feeling under pressure. I would say, I had a balanced day. 

To truly live a balanced life, you need to define what balance means to you. For me, balance is having time to spend with my wife and for exercise as well as doing my work. If I get those three areas into my regular working days I feel I have balance. 

If you are trying to lead a fixed schedule you are not likely to be able to achieve balance. You need to be flexible. There are too many unknowns that will come up on a day and so planning too far ahead will not work effectively. This is why you need a daily plan. When I planned my day, last night, I saw I had three calls, I knew I had to take my wife to her studio and I wanted time for exercise. I was able to review my calendar and knew when I needed to be in my office and when I did not need to be there. 

Now, as I have mentioned many times before, every plan needs to begin with your long-term goals, then areas of focus and finally your core work—the work you are paid to do. Building on this foundation ensures you have balance in your life. If you are not doing a weekly planning session, it’s easy to slip into someone else’s plan and that’s likely to be your company’s plan. There’s nothing wrong with that—all companies have a plan. But, their long-term plan should never be your long-term plan

The trouble is, if you don’t have your own plan it’s very easy to find yourself working solely on your company’s plan and that will make you feel out of balance because you are not doing anything for yourself. You are allowing your life to be dictated by the plan of your company. 

Finally, if you want to be able to stop working at a fixed time, then the best solution is to fix your dinner time. Your desire to work is not as strong as your desire to eat. I eat at 6pm. I never schedule calls at that time. That is my dinner time. If I did try and push through, it would not be long before my hunger would become too much and I would have to stop to eat. 

Now, this is easier done if you live with other people and you all eat dinner at the same time. It can be much harder if you live alone or members of your household eat at different times. But in my many years of experience, I’ve not found much that can trump hunger to get me to stop working. 

Now to prevent you from going back to work in the evening, you need a positive distraction. That could be exercise time, time with your friends and family or learning something new. But again, to make sure this happens block it in your calendar. 

The bottom line though, if you really want to bring your life into balance, you need to be intentional about it. You need to tell yourself to stop. Without an intention to do something else, you will allow yourself to work more than you intend to.

Balance is about knowing what you want from all parts of your life and doing something intentional about it. That’s why developing your eight areas of focus are important. Your family and relationships, career, finances, health and fitness, spirituality, personal development, lifestyle and experiences and your purpose. I like to spend time with my wife each day. I can do that by intentionally taking her to and from her dance studio or arranging to have lunch with her. 

I also like to study and exercise each day, so I have time for these activities blocked out on my calendar so I am not tempted to sit at my desk and respond to another email or write another article. 

Living a more balanced life is up to you. You can do this. Be intentional about how and where you spend your time. There is time for work, for a social life and for your hobbies (remember those?) but only if you are intentional about spending time in those areas. 

Thank you, Claire, for the question and again, I thank you for listening. 

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.