Unless you are someone who specifically works from home, taking any of your regular day to day tasks home with you after hours is a terrible choice. Work should be done at your desk, whilst sat at your comfortable mesh office chair, unless you have a flexible working arrangement in place. Anything else is playing with fire.
Why? For the following three reasons:
- You’re supposed to be off work at this point, spending precious time with your loved ones. If you take work home and do this out of hours, you’re throwing your home and work life balance completely out of whack.
- Taking any work out of the office is a huge security risk. It doesn’t matter whether the work is confidential, sensitive or not, there is a risk that you may lose a document or that the wrong person may get their hands on it whilst you’re sat working at your living room coffee table or transporting it from A to B.
- It shows that you can’t cope within your working hours. You might think you’re being diligent and efficient, trying to get more work done, but you’re actually showing your manager that you can’t cope within the working day and you need extra time. This shows incompetence in many ways, even if you’re trying to aim for the opposite.
Just as eating your lunch at your desk is a big issue in terms of balancing ‘me’ time and work time, taking work home is only going to cause stress in the long-term. Keep your work where it should be – in the contemporary office environment!
What do you think about taking work out of the office?