Long hours vs effective hours is a mix-up we see constantly in the people we coach. Security used to kick one of our coaches out of his office at midnight, and at the time he was proud of it. Looking back, he’d tell that version of himself his priorities were wrong.
The instinct to stay late feels like commitment. It often isn’t. Staying late doing ineffective work is, in his words, the easy option. Stopping is what actually takes discipline, because stopping sets you a deadline, and Parkinson’s Law does the rest of the work for you.
Give yourself a deadline, not more hours
Give yourself until midnight and you’ll be rushing at midnight. Give yourself until 6pm and you’ll be rushing at 6pm. The work expands to fill whatever time you allow it, so the answer isn’t to allow it more time. It’s to allow it less.
Pulling away from work earlier than feels comfortable is hard at first. Clients tell us this often. But once they do it, they notice they have more energy, they can find time for the things that energise them or give them relief from work stress, and then, almost without fail, they find themselves keen to get back to the work the next day rather than dreading it.
This is really about the gap between knowing you should stop and actually doing it, which is something we’ve written about before. Long hours and effective hours are two separate things, and it’s easy to mix them up for years without noticing.
If this sounds familiar, it’s the kind of thing we work through with clients in coaching.
If this sounds familiar at work, our ADHD leadership coaching helps leaders and managers build support around what gets in the way.
