If you’ve ever been watched by several pairs of eyes as you
left the office on the dot of the official closing time, you will know exactly
how I feel on most days at work. Admittedly, I only have to go in to the office
for two days of the week, and after meeting several of these stares with a ‘Yes?
Is there something you’d like to say to me?’ look, things have been marginally
less confrontational. But after spending
almost two years at a company where ‘official’ hours were a joke and you were
expected to work on weekends, national holidays, and pretty much any other time
the client needed you, my patience with those who obsess over man-hours runs
thin.
Here’s my rationale. I’m paid to do a job, and as long as I
do the work, do it well, and don’t get any complaints from my boss, I have
little or no interest in sticking to a clock just to please anyone else. And really, let’s be honest –there is
absolutely no guarantee that someone who is pinned to his/her seat for 12 hours
of the day is actually spending all that time doing actual work instead of
looking up movie timings for the late show.
‘Work to live, not live to work’ is the theory I’ve been
subscribing to for some time now. Not as a cop out for doing a shoddy job, but
for having some balance between what’s important, and how you can afford to
have it. And while I’m not sure if this is more an Indian trait or if clock-watchers
are spread far and wide across the globe, I really, really hope that this obsession with how many hours each person
spends at work will stop. Right about now would be a good time actually.
