3. Get in early and go home on time.

Too many people get to work fifteen minutes late, thinking they’ll stay late to make up the lost time. They spend the first half hour getting coffee and catching up with colleagues on the hot new reality TV show. Once they sit down, they make a couple of personal phone calls, and if they’re lucky, they’ll get in an hour or so of “real work” before lunch. Of course, lunch itself is split between planning an upcoming meeting at their desks and catching up on office gossip. With the rest of the day spent returning e-mails, they might get in two or three hours of real work. So they stay late, inevitably chatting with the other night owls for another half an hour. But it’s okay—after all, they’re “off the clock.”

These people leave the office hours later than they should. They feel burned out because they’ve been there for almost ten hours, crammed in lunch at their desks, and still have so much left to do. Such people often feel ill-used by the organization and see themselves as martyrs. But the truth is, they have wasted hours of valuable work time and have accomplished far less than they could have.

The most effective executives and aspiring executives and managers get in early and stay focused all day. To regain control of your day, first get to work on time. Or, better yet, early. Work smart and hard the entire time you’re there. Visualize a stopwatch ticking away in your head, if necessary. At lunch, leave the office—if only for five or ten minutes—to clear your head so you can be productive in the afternoon. If you want to catch up with friends at the office, schedule lunch with them. When colleagues drop by your office, tell them, “I’m working on something right now, but I’d love to catch up. Why don’t we schedule lunch?”

Don’t confuse time spent at the office with time spent working productively. Working hard and smart will liberate you to spend more time outside the office with the people you care about most.