Bripbrap is another personal finance blog that I enjoy reading.  In a recent post, he makes a lot of excellent points about how to make your workday more productive and pleasant.  As a full-time member of the “rat race,” I going to elaborate on a couple of Bripbrap’s points.

Point 14: Take off your shoes, wash your hands and shower when you get home.  Bripbrap advises you to incorporate this routine into your workday to slough off all of the nasty germs you may have picked up in the subway.  Another reason to get out of your work clothes immediately is so that you can get out of “work” mode and relax.  It’s hard to unwind when you’re still donning your starched shirt and itchy wool suit at the dinner table.

Point 12: Leave work early.  Bripbrap advises you to take the evenings for yourself and create your own wealth.  I wholeheartedly agree, which is why I ditched a job that required 70 to 80 hour workweeks for a (more or less) 9 to 5 job, where I could go home at a reasonable hour.  In my old job, I could never predict when I would be able to go home on a daily basis, and most weekends were devoted to more work.  Pretty bad, eh?  It got so bad that I worked 45 days in a row with not a single day off.  I was putting all of my energy and time into the job at the expense of my personal life and my finances.  Even though I was making more money at that job, I ended up spending more money to manage my life outside work.  Because of the hellish hours, I had to spend money hiring a cleaning person, gardener, etc., to do the tasks that I had no time to do.  With no time for comparison shopping, I also found myself spending more on purchases purely because of the convenience factor.  Moreover, I had no time left over to manage my finances.

However, I now have a more humane work-life balance, with more time to spend on developing business ventures and researching investing opportunities.  The result?  My net worth has increased significantly!  Being a dedicated employee is a good thing; devoting yourself lock, stock and barrel to your employer at the expense of all else is not a healthy or financially smart existence.  A job is just a job; it could disappear at anytime for any reason (as Bripbrap notes, witness the unfortunate employees of Bear Stearns).  But the opportunities and wealth that you build for yourself in your downtime stay with you.