Way too many lunch hours consist of checking email and voice mail between bites of a tuna sandwich. An Office Team poll of 700 employees showed that almost 20 percent of them always work through lunch. Too many family dinners are being missed because people are working through them as well. And hard-earned and much needed vacation days aren’t being taken.

It’s true that companies are demanding more productivity. But a lot of people are confusing a hard day’s work with workaholism. Workaholics tend to fall into three groups.

• Those who are driven -- even obsessed -- with the activity of work rather than being productive. A workaholic can be "somebody who works for the sake of being active rather than the results," said Robert Rosen, a psychologist and consultant to the Washington Business Group in a New York Daily News interview.

• Those who work hard to let off aggressive steam. "They are generally angry," says Rosen. Getting out this energy is good in a competitive business environment, but some people become overwhelmed by it.

• Those who are obsessed with order and control. Rosen says these folks can’t get through the forest for the trees, spinning their wheels because they’re so overwhelmed. The fact that you have more work is all the more reason to evaluate how you are working. Otherwise, you might not really be effective.

Such as one woman I know who fits into the third category. She is so stressed that she can’t sleep and yells and screams at everyone around her. She refuses help, saying, "It’s just as easy to do it myself."

Could be. But she’s causing a lot of other problems in the meantime and isn’t getting good results. If you really want to be productive, you’ll still work hard. But you’ll find ways to do that while contributing the best of you -- not the worst.

© by Andrea Kay