Find Time For Your Personal Life And Get A Handle On Your Out-Of-Control Work Schedule

If you feel like you’re working long and gruelling hours with no personal time, you’re not alone. Carve out vital personal time and continue climbing the ladder with these tips from career management professional Penelope Trunk.

Penelope is a career management specialist, founder of Brazen Careerist, newspaper columnist and author. Below is an excerpt of tips from her book Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success focused on reducing the time you spend in the office, working more efficiently while you’re there, and ultimately having more personal time. Photo by mjio.

It’s hard to leave the office at a reasonable time of day when your workplace culture centres on long hours. But the cost of not leaving work is high: a half-built life and career burnout. Of course, if you never work long hours, you will never appear committed enough to get to the top ranks. So your job is to work enough hours to look committed but not so many hours that you risk your personal life and your ability to succeed over the long haul.

People cannot work full-speed until they die. Pace yourself so you don’t burn out before you reach your potential. But don’t blame your long hours on your boss, your CEO, or your underlings. Someone who does not make a conscious, organised effort to take responsibility for the number of hours they work can be thrown off course by anyone. But the person who systematically follows the steps below will not be thrown off course, even by a workaholic boss in a workaholic industry:

Concentrate on quality of work over quantity. The person who builds a career on doing the most work commits to living on a treadmill. The work will never be done, and you will become known among your co-workers as someone who never turns down an assignment. Read: dumping ground. Quality is what matters. People don’t lose jobs for not working unpaid overtime-they lose jobs for not performing well at the most important times. Your resume is not a list of hours worked; it is a list of big accomplishments. Photo by Demion.

Know the goals of your job. You need to know the equivalent of a home run in your job. Get a list of goals from your boss, and understand how they fit into the big picture. Judge if your work is high quality by what people need from you and how they measure success. Be sure to get goals that are quality oriented and not hours oriented. Suggest replacing “Devote eight hours a week to cold-calling” to “Find six qualified leads in three months”.

Find the back door. Figure out what criteria people use for promotion. It is never only how many hours you work. In many professions you need to work a lot of hours, but there is always a way to be impressive enough to get the promotion without all the hours. Figure out how to turn out extremely impressive work so that you can get away with fewer hours. For example, if you’re a lawyer, you could pick up one very important client for the firm, and then cut back a little on your hours.

Refuse bad assignments. Figure out what matters, and spend your time on that.

Say no. Constantly. The best way to say no is to tell people what is most important on your plate so they see that, for you, they are a low priority. Prioritising is a way to help your company, your boss, and yourself. No one can fault your for that.

Go public. Tell people about your schedule ahead of time. For example: “I have Portuguese lessons on Thursdays at 7pm. The class is important to me.” When you plan a holiday, announce it early.

Find a silent mentor. Look for someone who is respected but does not work insane hours. This will take careful hunting because this person is not likely to be obvious about it. Watch him from afar and figure out how he operates. Few people will want to mentor you in the art of dodging work – it’s bad for one’s image. But you could enlist the person to help you in other areas and hope he decides to help you in the workload area as well. Photo by fotocromo.

Know your boss’s goals. Your best tool for saying no to a project is reminding your boss what her goals are. If she cannot keep track of her own goals, help her. Avoid unnecessary work that doesn’t matter to her so that you can do work that does matter to her.

Take control of what you can. Even small efforts at control add up to a lot. For example, avoid making meetings on Monday and you are less likely to have to prepare for meetings on the weekend. If you can, refuse meetings after 4.30pm and you are less likely to miss dinner at home. Ignore your phone while you write your weekly report and you’re less likely to stay late to finish it. You don’t need to tell people: “My policy is no meetings at x time.” Just say you’re already booked and suggest another time. You can’t do this for every meeting, but you can do it enough to make a difference in your life.

Know your own boundaries. “Wanting to work fewer hours” is too vague a goal because you won’t know which hours to protect. Try getting home by 7pm, not working weekends, or leaving for two hours in the middle of the day to lift weights. These are concrete goals for cutting back hours.

Create something important outside of work. If you don’t create a life outside of work that is joyful and engaging then you won’t feel a huge need to leave work. And if you don’t project a passion for life outside of work then no one will think twice about asking you to live at work. So get some passion in your personal life. If you can’t think of anything, start trying stuff: Snowboarding, pottery, speed dating. The only way to discover new aspects of yourself is to give them new opportunities to come out. Photo by Mike Baird.

Be brave. Brave people can say no when someone is pushing hard. The bravery comes from trusting yourself to find the most important work and to do it better than anyone else. But sometimes, the bravest thing to do is leave.

Penelope Trunk is the founder of 3 startups — most recently, Brazen Careerist, a career management tool for next-generation professionals. Her career advice appears in more than 200 newspapers. You can read more of Penelope’s productivity and business advice at her blog.