Today’s the Day: Go Home – or Knock Off – on Time

Today is ‘Go Home on Time Day‘. An initiative of The Australia Institute, ‘Go Home on Time Day’ recognises that a very large number of Australians frequently work longer than their standard hours.

The idea has grown out of Australia Institute research which revealed that Australians contribute more than two billion hours of unpaid overtime each year. The research, summarized on the GHOTD website also revealed:

On average, a typical employee works 49 minutes of unpaid overtime per day. For full-time workers, the average daily amount of unpaid work is 70 minutes, which equates to 33 eight-hour days per year, or six and a half standard working weeks. Put another way, this is the equivalent of ‘donating’ more than your annual leave entitlement back to your employer. Overwork can have negative consequences for your physical and mental health, your relationships with loved ones and your sense of what is important in life.

The full report is available from The Australia Institute website here.

The idea of ‘Go Home on Time Day’ is also relevant to those of us who work from home. Working from home can lead to a real tendency to just keep going, pausing only for an evening meal. Sometimes, of  course, this is a good thing. Today I’ve been painting my house in while the weather is good, and I’ll probably do some work tonight to make up the difference. Sometimes there is a deadline which requires particularly long hours, while other times a lull yields the opportunity to go shopping. ‘Work from Homers’ can adjust to these situations because they have the flexibility to do so.

But working from home also requires balance. It is easy to find yourself working longer and longer hours, becoming wedded to your job and forgetting that flexibility and balance were two of the reasons why you left the commuting workforce in the first place.

So today, whether you are in an inflexibility steady office job, a fully flexible work from home job or something in between, take heed of the message: Go Home – or Knock Off – on Time.

David Brewster is the editor of Your Balance. He is a Melbourne-based freelance writer and editor, writing on work, society, management and politics. He is also the author of two books. www.davidbrewster.com

Tagged as: australia institute, balance, Flexibility, go home on time day, overtime, Work from Home