May 24, 2006If I Come In Early, I’ll End Up Staying Late Anyway
This Poison Phrase comes from this week’s wonderful, eye-opening and inspiring Success Story. The contributor adjusted her hours to miss traffic, and Spoke Strong to protect her end time. The plan works well for her, but her coworkers are unwilling to follow her lead because they say,
- If I come in early I’ll end up staying late anyway.
The fact is, these people will end up leaving late because they don’t have the strength of will not to. The author of the story proved it could be done, but if someone is unwilling to back up arrangements with action, the best of arrangements will fall through. And many will blame others for the failure of the plan rather than taking responsibility for not honoring their own boundaries.
So if you believe you will end up staying late if you come in early, you will. But if you develop the strength of will to say,
I intend to honor my arrangement and to hold others to honoring it too,
That’s what will happen.
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I have a co-worker who routinely stays late into the evening to finish work for the day. I used to feel sympathetic for this person until I started to step back from the day to day workload and really review why she chooses to stay late every night. From what I can tell it is simply her personality. She has not documented her work processes. She has not trained anyone on how to help her. She is routinely on the computer chatting during the work day as well as on her cell phone. She chooses to keep the massive amount of work to herself and suffer in silence. From time to time she erupts and complains to management that she has to stay until 10:00 p.m. the night before (sometimes later) just to get the work out. If she would take the time to document and train in a back up person, delete the computer chat program, and hang up the phone she would not have to work late.
This personality type is what I call a martyr. “No one can do it as good as I can so I have to suffer and do it all.” The people who are martyrs place themself in that position and become comfortable there. The key point to remember with these personality types is that it is their choice. They are choosing to be a victim of corporate America rather than a leader for it.
Comment by Miranda — May 24, 2006 @ 2:29 pm
Meryl Responds
If you are confident in your employment, I recommend you take your boss at his word and unapologetically respond to messages the following morning. I suspect your boss sends things out when it’s ready to send and doesn’t think about what time it is. I send my assistants things at very odd hours sometimes, and don’t expect a response at those odd hours. I wouldn’t read too much into his messages, as women are often prone to do.
If you are less confident in your employment you may want to reaffirm your agreement and say something like,
I got a message from you at 5:20 yesterday and I get the impression that you expected a reply at that time. Since we agreed that my day ends at 5:00 I want to make sure you are comfortable with my responding in the morning.
Chances are he will say yes since he agreed to those hours. It sounds to me like you need to be clear in your boundaries and teach your boss that you are gone after 5:00. He may test your boundaries but it sounds like he will respect your boundaries if you do.
Comment by merylrunion — May 31, 2006 @ 12:25 pm