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Physical presence doesn’t always equate to mental presence. You could be sitting at your desk but more preoccupied about a home repair than the assignment at hand, or you could be at the kitchen table thinking more about the proposal you have to finish than the people eating dinner with you. That’s why transitions from work mode to personal mode are so essential.
And you have to make an especially intentional effort on these transitions when you work from home because you don’t have the natural change of context cues. In my experience as a time management coach, here are some of the ways to be less distracted and more present whether you’re working or enjoying personal time.
Have a starting work routine
Mr. Rogers knew how to do transitions right. Many generations of children knew that when he was singing his iconic “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” changing his sweater, and then putting on different shoes that it was the start of their time together.
You don’t need to sing when you start work (unless you really want to), and you don’t need to switch sweaters. But you can have certain things that you do in the same way each morning — even if you work from home. Maybe it’s putting your dishes in the dishwasher, turning off the lights that may be on around the house, getting a cup of coffee, and then sitting down at your computer….Continue reading….
By: Elizabeth Grace SaundersHarvard Business Review
Source: How to Transition Between Work Time and Personal Time
Critics:
Generally, business sector agrees that it is important to achieve work–life balance, but does not support a legislation to regulate working hours limit. They believe “standard working hours” is not the best way to achieve work–life balance and the root cause of the long working hours in Hong Kong is due to insufficient labor supply. The managing director of Century Environmental Services Group, Catherine Yan, said “Employees may want to work more to obtain a higher salary due to financial reasons.
If standard working hour legislation is passed, employers will need to pay a higher salary to employees, and hence the employers may choose to segment work tasks to employer more part time employees instead of providing overtime pay to employees.” She thinks this will lead to a situation that the employees may need to find two part-time jobs to earn their living, making them wasting more time on transportation from one job to another.
The Chairman of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce, Chow Chung-kong believes that it is so difficult to implement standard working hours that apply “across-the-board”, specifically, to accountants and barristers. In addition, he believes that standard working hours may decrease individual employees’ working hours and would not increase their actual income. It may also lead to an increase of number of part-timers in the labor market.
According to a study conducted jointly by the Business, Economic and Public Affairs Research Centre and Enterprise and Social Development Research Centre of Hong Kong Shue Yan University, 16% surveyed companies believe that a standard working hours policy can be considered, and 55% surveyed think that it would be difficult to implement standard working hours in businesses.
Employer representative in the Labour Advisory Board, Stanley Lau, said that standard working hours will completely alter the business environment of Hong Kong, affect small and medium enterprise and weaken competitiveness of businesses. He believes that the government can encourage employers to pay overtime salary, and there is no need to regulate standard working hours.
The structure of the work week varies considerably for different professions and cultures. Among salaried workers in the western world, the work week often consists of Monday to Friday or Saturday with the weekend set aside as a time of personal work and leisure. Sunday is set aside in the western world because it is the Christian sabbath.
The traditional American business hours are 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday to Friday, representing a workweek of five eight-hour days comprising 40 hours in total. These are the origin of the phrase 9-to-5, used to describe a conventional and possibly tedious job. Negatively used, it connotes a tedious or unremarkable occupation. The phrase also indicates that a person is an employee, usually in a large company, rather than an entrepreneur or self-employed.
More neutrally, it connotes a job with stable hours and low career risk, but still a position of subordinate employment. The actual time at work often varies between 35 and 48 hours in practice due to the inclusion, or lack of inclusion, of breaks. In many traditional white collar positions, employees were required to be in the office during these hours to take orders from the bosses, hence the relationship between this phrase and subordination.
Workplace hours have become more flexible, but the phrase is still commonly used even in situations where the term does not apply literally. Technology has also continued to improve worker productivity, permitting standards of living to rise as hours decline. In developed economies, as the time needed to manufacture goods has declined, more working hours have become available to provide services, resulting in a shift of much of the workforce between sectors.
Economic growth in monetary terms tends to be concentrated in health care, education, government, criminal justice, corrections, and other activities rather than those that contribute directly to the production of material goods.
Related contents:
- “Annual working hours per worker”.
- “Employment by sex and weekly hours actually worked (thousands)”. International Labour Organization.
- More and more workers join the part-time revolution”. The Daily Telegraph.
- “French labor laws”.
- Hoeryong Concentration Camp Holds 50,000 Inmates”.
- “Setting maximum work hours first”. China Daily.
- “Global, regional, and national burdens of ischemic heart disease and stroke attributable to exposure to long working hours for 194 countries, 2000–2016: A systematic analysis from the WHO/ILO Joint Estimates of the Work-related Burden of Disease and Injury”.
- Time and work in England 1750–1830,
- Man’s Rise to Civilization As Shown by the Indians of North America from Primeval Times to the Coming of the Industrial State.
- The Overworked American, pp. 43–seq, excerpt: Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today’s
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 24
- International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,
- “Working time in the European Union: the Netherlands”.
- Evolution de la durée du travail en France et dans le monde – Direccte”.
- Hours of Work in U.S. History”.
- “United States Average Weekly Hours”.
- American Time Use Survey Summary”.
- Countries where people work least”.
- 21 hours: Why a shorter working week can help us all to flourish in the 21st century
- Cut the working week to a maximum of 20 hours, urge top economists”
- Save the world with a 3-day work week”
- “Gapminder World” graph of working hours per week plotted against purchasing power- and inflation-adjusted GDP per capita over time
- “Business: On the Way to a Four-Day Week”.
- Study finds four-day work week optimal”.
- Working Less for a Sustainable Future”.
- The Ecological Limits of Work: on carbon emissions, carbon budgets and working time”
- Average annual hours actually worked per worker”.
- “Who works the longest hours? – BBC News”.
- Who works the longest hours in Europe?”.
- Average annual hours actually worked per worker”.
- Working time limits (the 48-hour week) : Directgov – Employment”.
- “No-vacation nation USA – a comparison of leave and holiday in OECD countries – Page 2, Paragraph 1 – Introduction”
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