Before you start

This is a short book and you can read it in two or three sittings. It's about one habit, which is leaving work at a reasonable hour and bringing it home anyway, in your head. Your hours might be fine. You might be home by six most nights. And still the meeting comes with you in the car, the problem sits down at the table, and the people you live with get whatever's left once the job has had its share of your attention, which is often not much.

I'm going to argue three things. The first is that the habit makes sense from the inside. Thinking about work feels like working, it feels like caring, and it takes the edge off the itch of a thing left unfinished. The second is that most of what rides home isn't the kind of thinking that moves a problem. There's a body of research on what people do with work in their heads after hours, and it separates two kinds of thinking that feel the same from the inside and do opposite things. The kind most of us do in the evening is the kind that gives nothing back to the job and takes a good deal from the evening. The third is practical. Close the day on paper before you leave. Mark the move from work to home with something you do on purpose. And when the problem gets in anyway, answer it with a line rather than an evening. Chapters 18 to 23 cover how.

This book isn't about caring less about your work. Some of the people who bring it home most are the ones who do it best. It's about where the caring goes in the hours it can't do anything.

Three cautions.

If the trouble is the hours themselves, the eleven o'clock finishes and the Sunday afternoons at the laptop, that's a different habit and an earlier book, The work will still be there, is about it. This one assumes you leave at a sensible time and the job follows you anyway.

If the job is the problem, if you're being bullied, or given more than anyone could do, or treated in a way you'd tell a friend to walk away from, then the thinking that follows you home is a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation and no evening routine will fix it. ACAS describes bullying at work as unwanted behaviour that's offensive, intimidating, malicious or insulting, or a misuse of power that undermines or humiliates. If that's your week, their advice pages are the place to start, and chapter 24 says a little more.

And if what follows you home is dread, if you're lying awake most nights, if you've felt low most of the day, most days, for a fortnight or more, the NHS says to see a GP. That's not a habit, and this book isn't the right tool.

The notes at the back give my sources and their limits. Where I'm giving my own reasoning and not a finding, I'll say so.