Perseverance is great but sometimes it can be confused with quitting and staying. What’s that, you say? Well quitting and staying is when you’re just going through the motions at work, not putting forth any great effort. For all intents and purposes you have quit, you just haven’t left your job.

No, you wouldn’t do that would you? Heavens no, not you, but some of your colleagues may have quit and stayed. Here’s how to tell if someone else (you) have quit and stayed.

1. Daytime Facebook posts seem just a bit more frequent than usual. After all, Facebook is the very visible part of a very large internet iceberg where time can be frittered away very profitably at work. (Reading this blog at work however is actually very valuable due to the pithy comments and excellent writing. Please tell 10 friends about it today so they can waste time too.)
2. Your friend (ahem) has taken a new interest in playing hide and seek at the office. This is a game I used to play many years ago, leaving my desk very messy and coming back periodically to make a call and push the paper around a bit. While other people might be hiding in washrooms, empty meeting rooms and the cupboard, I was actually using the time very profitably learning the difference between types of Scotch.
3. Going to lots and lots of meetings is another trick to quitting and staying. After all, if you’re at meetings, people think you are working. In fact, the more meetings you go to, the harder people think you are working. Paradoxically, meetings are a great place to nap with your eyes open, update LinkedIn and seem intelligent by asking penetrating questions. If you ask good questions, everyone will think you’re really bright when you actually have no answers. (Please note that I was very proud to use the word Paradoxically in this blog as I’ve been trying to find a use for it for some time now.)
4. Excessive need to serve customers better, particularly out of town ones is another great give-away. After all, you think, these customers deserve much more attention. It’s totally not intentional if the timing of these meetings just happens to make it better for me to do a bit more “work at home” at the beginning and the end of the day. Much more efficient for everyone….really.
5. “Working at Home” Do you remember how much “Homework” you used to do in high school? Yes and please tell me how effective that was. “Working at Home” means not having to go to meetings, play hide and seek, or excessively serve out of town clients better. It’s actually so much more efficient to pretend to work at home than pretending to work at the office.

Meanwhile, it’s Friday, the start of a long weekend. The weather is great. Stop all this incessant work. Go home and enjoy yourself.