Tuesday again

It's a Tuesday some months on, and at twenty past five you're writing three lines on a pad. They say to finish the rota for the north team, to ring the contractor about the Elm Road voids, and to give the draft of the board paper to Tom for comment. You check tomorrow's diary, close the laptop and put it in your bag. It stays in the bag until morning now. At half past five you say goodnight to the cleaner, who's just arriving, and go.

The first fortnight was as uncomfortable as promised. On the first Monday you stood in the car park at twenty-five to six feeling like a truant. You'd left eleven emails unanswered and a report half read. On Tuesday morning you dealt with all of it by ten o'clock. Nobody had noticed. By the third week the feeling had mostly gone, and something else had replaced it. At nine in the morning you were sharper than you'd been in years.

The work looks different. You have eight hours, so you start with what matters. The report that's already fine goes out as it is. You answer email in two batches, and your replies have got shorter. You handed the weekly performance figures to Priyanka, who does them differently and at least as well. You do less than you used to, measured in hours, and as far as you can tell nothing that matters has been dropped. One thing really didn't fit, which was the new compliance returns. You took that to Helen with a list, and she moved them to another team. She'd had no idea how long they took.

You told Helen what you were doing in the first week. You'd rehearsed a long justification. She listened to the first two sentences and said, "Good. I've been worried about you." She hasn't mentioned it since. Your review in the spring was the best you've had.

There have been exceptions. The board paper in March took two late evenings, planned on the Monday and finished on the Thursday, and on the Friday you left at half past five. In April you slid for a week without deciding to, and caught it when you noticed the laptop was on the kitchen table again. You put it back in the bag.

You're at the pool on Thursdays. Ellie came third in the backstroke last week and looked for you in the seats before she looked at the clock. You and Sam have started cooking together on Tuesday evenings, not very well. You've joined a five-a-side group on Wednesdays, where you're the second oldest and nowhere near the worst. On Sundays there's nothing, and on some Sundays you still feel the old pull at about eleven o'clock. You've learned to let it pass.

Tom still leaves at quarter past five. You've revised your opinion of Tom. You've also noticed that two others on the team have started leaving on time since you did, and that the department's numbers haven't suffered.

You're still ambitious and you still mind about the work. You've learned that the hours weren't a good way of showing either, and that the people you were trying to impress couldn't tell the difference.

Here's one action. Decide what time you'll stop tomorrow. Write it down now, along with the first three things you'll do the morning after. Then tell one person.