Page 187 - Talane Miedaner - Coach Yourself to a New Career_ 7 Steps to Reinventing Your Professional Life (2010)

STEP 7: MANAGING THE TRANSITION SMOOTHLY 175

to continue to work six days out of every seven or get rid of some of
her tasks. She asked her boss about a particularly time-consuming
report and was astounded to be told she didn’t have to do it.
It also is important that you manage how you are perceived
by your boss and colleagues. In other words, don’t be blabbing it
around the office that you are working only two hours a day so that
you can concentrate on your exciting new business or personal
project. Better to keep things under wraps and make sure you do
an excellent job (see Step 1). Matthew, a thirty-four-year-old com-
puter programmer, was using slow times between projects at his
current job to work on writing a book. He had been making steady
progress until he spilled the beans and told some coworkers he
was doing NANORIMO (nanorimo.org)—a project that requires
writing fifty thousand words in one month in your spare time.
Everyone in the office was supportive of his writing project and
kept asking him every day how many words he was up. Because
there was so much attention on him, he didn’t dare write a single
sentence while at work, for fear that his colleagues and manager
would think he wasn’t toeing the line. So, he actually made better
progress when no one knew what he was doing. Whatever you do,
you need to make it look as if you are working just as hard as, if
not harder than, everyone else. You may think it sounds impos-
sible, but if you determinedly focus on the 20 percent, you’ll be
more productive for the company, not less.
One client, who worked eighty hours a week in mergers and
acquisitions at a major U.S. bank, had recently married and was
frustrated that he never had time to eat dinner with his new wife.
To remedy the situation, he went so far as to move to an apartment
that was a ten-minute walk from his office in Manhattan, elimi-
nating a thirty- to forty-minute commute to New Jersey. Then,
when he went for dinner, he didn’t tell his colleagues he was going
home to dine with his wife; instead, he left his coat on the back of
his chair, his light turned on at his desk, and his work in progress
and mumbled something about talking with so-and-so in such and
such department. He’d proceed to go home and have an enjoyable
dinner with his wife and then come back and put in another hour