Leave your Work in The Office- Enjoy a Holiday

By TANIA NGIMA

Research shows that if you give in to the temptation to work from home, even if it is to check an email, you end up burning out and losing everything.

Imagine a scenario where the minute you get home your boss and co-workers call you incessantly with queries, requests and work. While this may seem like your work-life boundaries are being thwarted, it is exactly the same thing when you decide to do ‘just a bit of work’ from home.

We live in an era where the Blackberry and email-enabled phones and laptops create mobile offices for us while we’re on the go. Unfortunately, research shows that if you give in to the temptation to work from home, even if it is to check email, you end up working longer hours. This leads to lower long-term productivity.

Experiments by Henry Ford, an automobile manufacturer showed that working shorter hours increases the total work output and he popularised the 40-hour work week.

Proper relaxation leads to peak productivity when you get back to work; the hard part is how to ensure that you effectively relax and ‘leave work at work’.

Manage expectations

Avoid the impulse to quickly check your email or respond to a query if it is not urgent. For people who travel a lot in their line of work, there’s usually the need to fulfill your quota of tasks, all the while keeping on tabs back home.

Use the ‘out of office’ auto reply. There is a reason it was created. Unless yours is a one-man office and you’re the one man, leave instructions for who can be consulted in your absence and give a number to be reached on only in case of emergencies. Or don’t leave a number at all; office emergencies tend to be created, not real.

If you’re away on a holiday in Mombasa, leave as many gadgets as you can back home; the laptops, Blackberry and email devices. The anxiety that comes with not knowing what is going on back in the office will dissipate after a day or two.

Create boundaries

Being able to effectively create boundaries means you have capable colleagues who can handle matters arising in your absence or make judgment calls. If you don’t have this support framework then you will need to work hard to create it to prevent every query being something only you can handle.

If you work from home, set aside a defined room or a space to make boundary setting easier. Once you are through working for the day or the morning, physically stepping out of the space or room will help you switch off from work mode. And even though you may feel the need to put in 14-hour days into a business or venture that relies only on you to succeed, the danger is that you may end up burning out and losing everything altogether.

Plan ahead

To prevent the feeling that you have so much that has not been done from following you around, learn to keep a to-do-list.

Spend a few minutes at the beginning of each day looking at it and adding any new items on and a few minutes at the end of each day reviewing your progress and creating one for the next day.

Usually, the constant thoughts running through our heads about one thousand things to be done is just noise, the physical act of putting these tasks down on paper acts as a mental shift and relaxes your subconscious.