This is what my friends and family have spent the last seven years doing:

In looking back, there were dinners to which I was late by two or more hours.  The number of meetings and dinners (and dinner meetings) to which I was late far outnumbered those to which I made it on time.  I always thought that there was nothing I could do about it — I had to work.  It was the responsible thing to do.  People were counting on me.  The work that I did was important.

Plenty of people work very, very long hours.  Everyone seems to have endless piles of things to get through.  But I realized that, sometimes when you get used to working all the time, you take all of that time for granted.

It’s a vicious cycle.  You bust your ass and work on a Sunday night until 2am.  You might do the same on Monday and Tuesday.  On Thursday, a new project comes in.  If the team worked until 9pm on Thursday and Friday, it could get completed by Friday night.  But what happens more often than not is that your team of zombies spends most of Thursday catching up with co-workers, facebook, and whatever else they have missed since Saturday.  They go out on Thursday to blow off some steam.  Then Friday comes along, and…well, who wants to stay at the office late on a Friday.  So before you know it, everyone is saying “I’ll just do it over the weekend.”  And before you know it, it’s Sunday night.

Some people and some industries will never snap out of this cycle.  To the extent nothing great can be done without a team, some delay is inevitable — some discussions just have to wait until the team can all make a meeting.  But apart from that unavoidable delay, I feel there’s a good chunk of time (i.e., YOUR time) that is wasted because someone else is choosing to do something other than work, on the assumption that you will be available at 5:30pm (or, in my case, 8pm) to meet.

I’ve always been a hard worker.  My very first job was 9 to 4:30, and that wasn’t enough so I tacked on a waitressing job that kept me busy until 12:30am.  So it’s not the number of hours spent working, but the number of hours spent at work (but not working) that dawned on me as a huge waste, a waste of MY LIFE.

So, I’ve decided that this deserves some time, reflection, and action.  Hopefully putting it down in writing will result in further clarity, since how things appear can change depending on the season and how the sunlight happens to hit it at that particular moment.