Do You Take Work Home?

What are the topics of discussion with your partner and family members when you reach home from office everyday? The filtered highlights of the day at work, updates on your favorite or not so favorite client or business partner, arguments with a colleague or slack service at office canteen? If your discussions are centered on these or anything that happened between 9.00 A.M and 6.00 P.M, perhaps it is high time you take a look at your work-life balance.

Sharing your life at workplace with your family or partner would give you some sort of reassurance and an opportunity to offload, but harping again and again on the minutest of details long after the day is over can have its own negative repercussions.

According to an unpublished study commissioned by a leading lifestyle magazine in India 30% of the respondents spend less than three hours with their spouse/family each day, and that two in ten of them spent less than 15% of their time together conversing.This study was done in Indian metropolitan cities,but situation would not be very different elsewhere. So, do you really want those precious conversations to be about the faulty computer, the crowded office canteen and the rude boss?

Emma Wimhurst, entrepreneur and author in her famous book Boom! Sums it up. “That’s why I don’t think it’s good to share,” she elaborates. “If I go home and share every single moment of my day, my husband’s eyes glaze over. I think you need to have a split between work and home. That doesn’t mean cutting someone out of your working life; it just means not dragging them into it day in, day out.The result is that we don’t talk about the bad parts unless they have real meaning to us. You need to know when to leave the working day behind you and do something else with your time instead.”

The concept of the work-life balance often confuses many of us .You may say that such a division is easier to preach but far more difficult to practice. To many of you it may appear to be an artificial construct. Because physically we may spend our day in two different places but in our minds we don’t. We do think of work at home and personal issues in work.Agreed, but let me clarify. Undoubtedly, it is not at all a good idea, to let your workplace worries pressure-cook you or to consider talking about your day-to-day activities with your dear ones a taboo. In fact, appreciating what your partner and family does for 5 days a week, and helping them understand what you do, is extremely healthy. But the key is in understanding that we need to discuss work and at the same time  learn to restrict the time we spend doing it, knowing when to switch off. If the spectre of your annoying boss looms over dining table just as he does over your office desk then what’s the point in going home?

“Be guided by each other and find middle ground,” an HR expert, who was my boss once, would advise: “Create a balance in what you discuss. Don’t make assumptions about what your partner and family members are willing to discuss or listen to, and be open about what you want to achieve through that discussion.” Wimhurst echoes the same thought when she writes: “The atmosphere of the evening changes if I share every work incident with my husband. There’s a fine line between being involved and being boring. The result is that we don’t talk about the bad parts unless they have real meaning to us.”

So, keep a handle on the time you spend talking about work. Agree to ban shop talk for at least for one evening every week, or limit such discussions to before you sit down to dinner. Offloading every minutia of the day is nothing but encroaching on your personal life so much that you never leave work at the office at all.

Some one rightly said – “ partnerships and relationships are like a Venn diagram. There are huge parts where you don’t interact but when you meet in the middle, make it count.”