Can we leave work at the office?

Work has taken over.

It started with the Blackberrys in the early 2000s and now it’s everywhere: the portable office. And covid took it to a whole new dimension. Work has taken over home, sleep and everything else.

You can be expected to reply to an office email at 11 in the night or on a Saturday afternoon. Essentially, you are working 24x7 without being paid to do so.

What are your office hours?

A lot of us can’t answer that question. When does work begin and when does it end?

When we don’t have a specific time that we end working, we start burning the candle at both ends, which only leads to exhausting the candle at double the rate without much benefit.

It’s a bad deal, both for the employees and for the companies. Exhausted employees are less likely to do productive work, especially when they are too used to doing busy work.

Can we fix an end time, a time after which we aren’t expected to respond? Is that too much to ask?

Don’t work from home.

Even if you don’t want to go to your office and there can be a number of reasons why you shouldn’t, you should avoid working from home. Take a coworking space or use a cafe or a library if you need to.

When we work from home, it becomes extremely difficult to create boundaries between work and personal. Everything overlaps and we aren’t able to make sense of much.

Use separate devices.

Invest in a separate phone. Don’t add your work email on your personal phone. Same with the work WhatsApp groups, if there are any. Similarly, don’t use your office laptop for personal work and vice versa.

A good practice would be to leave the office devices in the office itself or at least to switch them off once our work hours are over. This way, even if we have to work in case of an urgency, it would be an exception rather than a norm.

But it is just an email. It would take only 10 min to reply.

Our productivity is cyclical in nature and it requires a cool down period to increase the peak productivity during the week.

But when we check our email or indulge in a work call after work hours or during the weekend, we take away this cool down period. We introduce stress and activity resulting in sub-optimal productivity.

Turning off completely allows us to get back to work with full focus the next day or week.