When is your closing time?
I often ask my clients what time they leave the office each day (or shut down their computer at the end of each evening).

Some people need to leave the office at a specific time each day (i.e., if they have a train to catch). However, when such a ‘hard stop’ does not exist, I find that many professionals are reluctant to define a specific “closing time”. They may want to leave the office at 6pm but without a ‘hard stop’ this can too easily slide into 7pm or 8pm. The same could be said for those of us logging on from home in the evenings. Our work sessions can go on and on – until we are too tired to respond to another e-mail.

This routine is hardly surprising given demanding workloads. There are always more things to do and it can be so rewarding to knock just one more thing off of our plate.

Let’s review some of the benefits of hard stops:

1) Imposes deadlines – and many would agree that deadlines heighten our productivity!
2) Requires us to optimize our productivity during the time we have allocated for work. Saving a minute or so each hour (which is easy to do) can quickly add up to an hour a week or four hours per month. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a spare four hours?
3) Forces us to prioritize our work and more accurately evaluate our capacity when we consider taking on more work. This keeps us more focused on high- value, high-impact activities which improve our overall effectiveness.
4) Allows us to preserve our precious and limited time that we want to allocate to other things. And I have yet to meet someone for which there were not many, many other things!

If you start to find that work is becoming all consuming, it’s time to start putting some boundaries around your workday. (Creating a schedule structure aligned to your key priorities is another strategy, but that is the subject of another e-newsletter).

A specific closing time requires your full commitment to leave at that time – and not 5, 9, or 29 minutes after that time. It’s a slippery slope once we start delaying our closing time.

I’ll end this note by posing the question again: when does your work end? It’s definitely something worth thinking about.