National Leave Work Early Day

If confining your workweek to 40 hours is as foreign as speaking Mandarin or replacing an engine in your car, Laura Stack has some advice.

“You can get your life back,” said Stack, a productivity expert in Denver and author of Leave the Office Earlier (Broadway, 2004, $12.95). “You’ll have the same responsibilities, but you’ll learn to do them in less time.”

You can begin Thursday, which she has designated National Leave the Office Earlier Day. The push comes at a time when, according to a March survey by Microsoft Office, Americans work an average of 45 hours a week, but say that more than a third, or 16 hours, are unproductive.
advertisement

Other survey results:

• Weekly meetings, which take up 5.5 hours, accomplish little, according to 71 percent of U.S. workers.

• 66 percent of Americans don’t have work/life balance.

• The most common productivity pitfalls are procrastination, lack of team communication and ineffective meetings.

Stack has seven tips for leaving the office early, the most important being to learn assertiveness.

“I’ve rarely, if ever, seen someone be fired because they said, ‘I can’t attend the meeting’ or ‘I have to leave at 5,’ ” she said. “You can always get another job; you can’t get another family.”

The inability to effectively use technology, especially e-mail, is a productivity killer for many, Stack said. People are interrupted too often by it and don’t know how to sort messages into folders for later use.

Her other tips include:

• Start meetings before 4 p.m. and insist on ending by 4:30 p.m. The best meeting time: right after lunch.

• Start small. Pick a single day to leave earlier and work that day more carefully. As your productivity skills rise, add more days.