According to the interwebz, this day was championed by some sort of employee productivity expert. I have never heard of a company implementing this as policy, but I rather like the idea of being able to leave when you’re done. This was one of the nicest parts about working at a newspaper: You arrived, there was work to do. When the last page was with the printer, you went home. Next day, clean slate.

Unfortunately, most jobs don’t work like that. Bank tellers, grocery clerks, pharmacists, and the like can’t just check out when no customers come in for a few minutes. (On the plus side, when I was a bank teller, I was urged to have no guilt about taking a lunch break when the line was out the door. I never understood that policy, either. Why not schedule tellers’ lunch shifts when customers aren’t at the bank on theirs?)

My current job requires billing by the hour. So you can leave early, but you’ll take a hit—vacation time, sick time, working longer some other day. On the other hand, I also work from home, so I have no office to leave. That said, I do shuffle my hours around quite a bit to leave the house and go shopping/golfing/gallivanting.

So if you have a chance to leave the office early, what will you be doing instead? Give me a good answer and I’ll send you a book or a baked good.