The thought of you ever leaving your company sends shudders through your spine. You rather spend your time at work than at home with your cats. As much as I applaud the fact that you love your job and your company, it is not healthy to have a fixation on your workplace. I know because I always have an obsession with the companies I worked in.
You see, I’m a workaholic and a perfectionist. A bad combination of my personal life but a wonderful asset for my bosses. I’m so passionate about what I do, I’ll do and redo the tasks I’m given so that it will be perfect. I’ll go the extra mile on the extra mile to surprise and delight my superiors. I’ll happily (and I really mean over-the-top joy) volunteer to take over tasks from my project mates. In fact, I have more than once took over the entire project on my own. I am an excellent worker, a wonderful manager but I sucked at my personal life. My social life even revolves around who I can network in order to have an edge over my career.
These are the signs that you have an unhealthy fixation on the company you work in
You cancel a social appointment that you have been looking forward to because you want to complete the task at hand even when it is not urgent.
Your working hours are 8am to 5pm but you never leave your office building during daylight.
Your dinner consists of whatever is leftover from lunch. Or whatever the cafeteria is serving for dinner.
You have been assigned a difficult project that requires submission in a month’s time but you completed within a week so that you can redo the report in multiple styles and pick the one you think is best.
You lost count how much annual leave you have left because you never take them.
And when you do go on a holiday, you ended up wishing the holiday is over so you can go back to work.
You spend the first day of your vacation planning what souvenirs to buy for your colleagues and the last day of your vacation clearing your accumulated emails.
You secretly risk overseas data charges as you downloaded your emails when you are supposed to travel for pleasure.
You rather hang around in the office, chit-chatting with your colleagues than to go on a blind date. Even though you have not been dating for a year.
You feel more comfortable in your little square cubicle than your bedroom.
Your friends are all from work.
You felt a loss of identity if you are not associated with work.
You can’t even fathom the possibility of resignation. If your company closes down, it will be the end of the world for you.
You have a panic attack if you saw that you have a missed call from work while you’re at showers.
You are one in a thousand employees but whenever there is a product launch, you can’t sleep for a week.
Monday to Friday, you stay hoarded up in your office. Saturday, you stay hoarded up at home to summarize what you did for this week. Sunday, you stayed hoarded up at home to prepare for Monday.
You have a much better and more expensive earphones in your office drawers than you do in your pocket because you only enjoy listening to music at work.
You are stressed out a month before you go on 3 days break. Or you spend 3 days to handover your daily work to someone who is covering you for 1 day.
You couldn’t sleep because of a tiny mistake you made at work today. And your boss has already forgiven and forgotten the mistake.
You kept your 2017, 2016, 2015… basically all the emails from the day you joined the company because you love rereading them.
If you have ticked half of the list above, you developing an unhealthy love for your workplace. However, if you have all of the above, you seriously have an obsession with your company. But don’t worry, you’re not alone because the above listed 20 of them came from my own experience as an obsessed perfectionist. One of my bosses ever mentioned to me if I put in as much as 50% of my effort at work in my personal life, I probably will marry in my twenties, have a dozen children and travelled half of the world.
As such, I moved towards having a much healthier work-life balance without impacting my productivity.
Selectively
Instead of taking on Every. Single. Project. I select the ones that help me grow the most.
Cut Down
Cutting down on unnecessary overtime and specifically avoiding meetings on Friday afternoon so I have more time to round up the week during my working hours.
Repeat After Me
My mantra changed from “I’ve got so much work to do.” to “My company won’t collapse just because I am away at work today.”
Ask For Help
This is the greatest and the best thing you can do to change. Whether it is asking someone for help in your work or delegating some of your responsibilities to someone else, you set the demon of micromanaging free and learn to trust another human to do the task as well (if not better) than yourself.
Forced Break
This is my favourite! I regularly forced myself to go on a technological cleanse where I have no wifi, no internet, no iPhone, no laptop, no TV, no radio… nothing electronic. Not even the iWatch. To effectively do this, I travel to my favourite island Tioman where there are resorts that allows me to forgo the world happenings and embrace the fear of missing out (FOMO).
Follow these 5 steps and you’ll find your life immediately much better, more space to breathe, less stressful and tense and perhaps more time to tick off that buried bucket list of yours.
Do you have other signs of working obsession that I may have missed out? Please share with us in the comments!
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