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Be bold enough to go home

Aktualisiert: 15. Juni 2020

Going home when your work is done seems to be extremely challenging to a lot of us. Have you ever faced times when you were idly watching time on the job go by until it would be socially acceptable to leave? I am not addressing situations in which work needs to be done even though you have already put in a full eight hours – what I am talking about is not calling it a day after nine hours of work and no unaccomplished tasks left.


If you know what I am talking about, I am pretty sure you know the struggle connected with this dilemma. Leaving office after having completed work is not tough when working all by yourself – splitting from a team consisting of a majority of co-workers who compete in the game of “who can stay the longest” is a completely different story.


Spending unnecessary and non-chargeable hours on a project is probably the most discouraging thing to happen to a motivated and result driven person.


Just imagine the following situation: as a young consultant you start your working day at 8 am at a clients’. You prioritize your tasks and work on them throughout the day in alignment with your project manager. Everything goes according to plan and you are even able to come up with an out of the box solution for a specific problem. At about 7:00 pm you happily realize that you have finished all of your tasks in the best way possible. You pack up your bags and drop by your manager’s place to say goodbye. His reaction: “Oh, so you already want to leave? Are you working part time now? Consultants are the first to be there in the morning and the last ones to leave at night! If I were you, I would feel quite guilty leaving even though my colleagues are still working!”


You will meet these people in the consulting industry more often than you would like. But why did these people turn out this way? Let us take a look at the three most frequent psychological patterns underlying their thinking:

  1. Some people honestly believe in the doctrine that they have to work long hours and that only the one who works the longest actually deserves the paycheck. This dogmatic behavior is often rooted in the way someone has been socialized and the cultural background of their upbringing. You can recognize these people by sentences like “careers get made when a partner sees you at 12 pm in the office”, but those times are over. Just compare how Henry Ford's tayloristic factory system performs versus Google's business model today.

  2. Some people have to stick around for as long as possible because that is their only chance of being seen. Let me explain this: one way of being seen in an organization is through the quality of your contribution. In this case your clients, colleagues or your boss recognize you because of the impact you have on the business you are jointly trying to improve. But there are people that are simply not able to draw attention to themselves in that way. Those people try to be seen in the literal sense of the word “see”. They come early and leave late in the hope of literally being seen by others. These people enjoy reputations like “Tom is always the last one leaving the office.” This is their only chance of sticking out.

  3. In some peoples’ lives there is really nothing but work. This may sound sad, but some people are detached from reality having been in the rat race for too long. Especially in the consulting industry, you will find people with no real friends, no contact with their families and no other interests or hobbies (personal remark: watching a soccer match in the hotel lobby at night is not a hobby). In a nutshell: these people have no reason to leave the office because there is nothing waiting for them.

You don’t have to measure up to these standards – be greater than that. Have a mindset that is committed to contributing value and never forget: business is just a big game, but the stakes in this game are as high as they can be when looking at working hours: You pay with your numbered amount of days on this planet. With this mindset you will find it easier to be bold enough to go home when your work is done. To be confident in doing this, take the following three advices to heart:

  1. Set a goal for each working day and make it public. If you have reached the goal, be proud of your achievement and go home - even if you are challenged about it. Try not to get sucked into meaningless work. You committed to achieving something of value that you made clear.

  2. Be bold when leaving. Do not try to justify why you are leaving at that time on that day. When your work is completed, simply leave. Do not promote the rat race.

  3. When checking out with your manager, ask “Is there anything else that has to be done today?”. That way you are aligned with your superior and show the willingness to help if anything is time-critical. On the other hand you also show that you will only keep working if it is really necessary.

To give you a closing thought on the topic: If you charge eight hours, but work twelve, you actually give the client a 50% discount on your work.


To sum this section up:

Do not get into an arms race of everyone trying to work longer hours for no particular reason. The currency in which you want to contribute is value, not hours. Keep in mind: when talking about how many hours to put in a project, we are ultimately talking about the most valuable thing you have - your finite lifetime.

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