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 Writing down how, when, and where they will complete the tasks may
help workers enjoy their evenings, the author of the study says.
“When goals are left incomplete, even beyond the work setting, they
tend to linger on our minds,” said Brandon Smit of Ball State
University in Indiana, the author of the new study.
“We know that getting a break from work demands reduces fatigue and
increases positive mood among employees,” Smit told Reuters Health
by email. “It even predicts better job performance the following
day, and that’s saying nothing to the obvious benefits to
individuals who are present and engaged with their loved ones during
family time.”
Through Amazon’s crowdsourcing website Mechanical Turk, Smit
surveyed 103 people using two online questionnaires per day for five
workdays. Participants submitted one survey immediately after work,
including information on daily complete and incomplete goals, and
another right before going to sleep, assessing how much they had
thought about work since returning home.
More than half the participants worked from home occasionally or
most of the time. Most worked at least 40 hours per week and none
were unemployed, according to their responses.
About half of the respondents were randomly assigned to receive
instructions on how to make a plan for when, where and how they
would complete remaining tasks.
In one example, a credit analyst listed an incomplete goal as “call
back customers about financial disputes.” The written plan for
completion was, “I will go into work and start at 10:00 AM in a call
center in my office. Log into my computer and call customers back on
the multi-line phone to inquire more information about the disputes.
After a thorough investigation and verifying evidence, make a final
decision and send correspondence to the customer.”
People more often spent time in the evening thinking about
incomplete goals rather than complete ones, Smit reported in the
Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.
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Those who wrote a plan for completing the goals at the end of the
workday spent less time thinking about those tasks in the evening
than people in the comparison group who did not write a plan.
Writing a plan was only effective for people with higher levels of
job involvement, though, Smit noted.
“More and more people are finding it difficult to unwind and relax
after work,” said Mark Cropley of the University of Surrey in the
U.K. who was not part of the new study.
Cropley is the author of the book “The Off Switch: Leave work on
time, relax your mind but still get more done.”
Inadequate recovery from the demands of work has been tied to poor
health outcomes including a higher risk of cardiovascular disease,
negative mood states, poor sleep, and increased fatigue, as well as
poor work outcomes like decreased productivity, lack of detachment
and an increased risk of making mistakes, Cropley told Reuters
Health by email.
“One of the best ways to detach is to develop and pursue a hobby
that focuses the mind,” he said.
Setting time barriers, like always stopping at six p.m., or physical
barriers, like not checking work emails at home, can help keep work
and life separate, Smit said.
What about the internal sources of distraction, such as nagging
worries about tomorrow’s presentation?
“Sometimes we, ourselves, are the source of work spilling over into
our personal lives,” Smit said. “In this case, planning may help put
us in a state of mind that better allows us to switch off from work
in the evening.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1j9zBwW Journal of Occupational and
Organizational Psychology, online November 12, 2015.
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