How to Leave the Office at 5PM (Really)

Every morning you set a goal to leave the office in time to spend the evening hanging out with your loved ones. And every evening around 5 or 6PM, you look at the mound of not-done work and realize it's not happening.
But before you settle for another late night of Chinese food and furious family members, think about this: some people manage to have both fulfilling careers and fulfilling home lives. What do they know? After studying hundreds of time logs, I've realized that these successful people adopt a few key tactics for shutting down and shipping out:

1. Realize you can leave before everything's done. In our rapid-fire age, email, requests for assistance, calls and meetings can fill all available space. If you aim to go home with inbox zero, you may never go home. Work will always be there and will take whatever time you give it. So give it less time. We all have a point of diminishing returns.

2. Split your shifts. Leaving the office at 5PM doesn't mean you need to be done for the night. Try going home, spending time with your family or pursuing other personal projects, and then fire your laptop back up around 8:30PM for another hour or two. You'll probably be refreshed enough to solve problems that would have taken you until 8:30 if you'd stayed put.
3. Do a 4PM triage. If your to-do list for the day has been too ambitious, you'll probably realize, by mid-afternoon, that it can't all happen by 5PM. So at 4PM, go through and rank the most important tasks. If you knew that the electricity was going to go off in your office at 5PM, rendering more work impossible, what would you do before then? Do those things. Then stop. Pick up the to-do list again at 8:30PM, or the next morning. Who knows, maybe some of the problems will have solved themselves in the night!
What time do you leave work in the evening -- and what time would you like to leave?

Related:

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• The Biggest Time Saving Tip of All
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Emailers

Photo courtesy flickr user, swanksalot

[Tanya_S]

I would never leave the office on time. It was a non-stop nightmare. Every time I meant to go home at 6.00 pm (the end of the working day), our boss would rush into the office and say we have to come up right now with a strategy for this and that client. Or she would just come in and start chatting with us on whatever we were doing.

This was the case until I started going to sports classes, which started at 7.00 pm. I had to go home, grab my tracksuit and rush to the gym. So, I had a serious excuse to leave on time. At first I felt pretty bad when I had to leave my colleagues but I could see the other's respect that I did not submit to our bosses influence. I'm glad I did it.

[gombhargav]

Nice point made by the author. As there is nothing without exceptions I would say sometimes we are forced to stay and finishup some code or some task which would accelerate things the next day for you or for others. I feel checking the to-do list at 4PM certainly is helpful. It would be nice to let your manager know when you are about to leave and have discussion of the todays tasks assigned by him/her. Thanks for the nice article and suggestions.