As there's only 24 hours until my workshop Reclaim Your Evening kicks off, it seems like a good time to put forward a few reasons for why you might be working longer hours than you want to be (if that's something you find yourself doing). 

I’m not suggesting these reasons will all be relevant.

But I am suggesting one or two of them might. 

I’ll let you be the judge:

*** You've built your identity around being the person who works late in the office. So not working late means risking your whole identity and you’d prefer not to do that 

*** Your to-do list is like a leaky bucket. You’ll never “complete” your to-do list, in the same way you’ll never fill a bucket which has a hole. And even though you know that’s true, you don’t know how or when to stop working. So you keep going

*** You're avoiding something, even if you don’t know what. But your home life, your hobbies or even just not being in the office are harder than being in the office. So you avoid them by staying at work

*** You’ve decided that the longer you work, the more worthy you are as a human being. So you keep working to feel more worthy

*** You're exhausted and your exhausted thinking is telling you to keep working. After all, fatigue makes everything look more urgent and important than it actually is. And not only are you listening to your exhausted thinking (which is optional in & of itself), but you’re acting on that exhausted thinking too 

*** Rightly or wrongly, you’ve decided that the more other people see you work, the more likely you are to get that promotion, snag that bonus or get yourself noticed

*** You don’t know how to say “no” when you get given more work to do than the time you have available to do that work

*** You've confused motion with progress. So you're doing an enormous amount each day, but you’re not making much progress. So you do even more, you still don’t get anywhere...and on it goes like a dog chasing its own tail

*** Your job is unpredictable and it feels like you have no control over when you stop working for the day. So you've stopped trying. You’ve accepted the fact that work will always expand to fill all your available time and you’ve decided there's no point fighting it

*** There’s something genuinely cool but really scary you’d love to do outside your day job and staying busy at work is a great way to pretend that now’s not the right time to get started

*** You're in flow at work more often than not. Time disappears, problems dissolve and you’re so absorbed in your work that you often come up for breath at 9pm and don’t even realise how late you’ve been working

*** You care about the people you work with. So even though you don’t want to be working late, you keep going because it feels good to contribute, to help other people and to be part of something that matters

*** You're learning on the job and the hours don’t feel like a sacrifice but like you’re levelling up instead. And even though you don’t want to be working late, you do want to keep learning. So that’s what you do

*** You're creative and your job gives you room to create. Sure, it might also be chaotic and unpredictable. But you have time and space to make stuff, to solve things your way and to actually build something. And you can’t get enough of that, so you keep doing more of it

*** You actually like your work! But you haven't given yourself permission to say that. So you tell yourself "I have to work" when really it's "I want to work, but I'm not supposed to want to work this much"

Maybe none of these are hitting home for you.

But perhaps the reason you’re working longer than you want is now staring you in the face.

Which means the question then becomes…

How do you start taking back your time?

Well, I’ll tell you how not to take back your time. And that’s by using whatever time management hack your favourite productivity guru is peddling. No funky time management technique (however trendy, slick or “backed by science”) will ever help with ANY of the above. You can’t solve a headache with a toothbrush. So why would a thinking, identity, habit or fear problem ever be solved with a time management technique?

It won’t.

But there is something that will help you reclaim your evening. Not something you need to remember or apply but something which will change the way you see time itself.

Enter my new workshop Reclaim Your Evening.

On the workshop I’ll spill the beans on the one shift which can help you take your time back if you're working longer hours than you want to be.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be evenings where you have no choice but to work late.

But it does mean that decisions about when to stop working will get less agonising. It also means you'll start to get your evenings back.

If you’d like to find out what I recommend to reclaim your evening, the workshop kicks off exactly 24 hours from the time I hit send on this email.

So not long to go.

All the details are here:

Reclaim Your Evening

To fulfilment,

Tom