You’ve been preparing to enter the world of IT consulting for what seems like an eternity. You know your skills are sound — you can navigate your way around every OS known to humankind, you can subnet like nobody’s business, and security… no one can keep the unwanted out like you. So what’s stopping you from being the best IT consultant ever? Maybe it’s clients, Murphy’s Law, scheduling, meetings, or coworkers.

Here’s the deal: Education and training cannot fully prepare you for life in the field. In your IT classes at school, do you remember any of your teachers ever telling you that you will be working on a client’s machine when a customer comes in — so the client yanks the machine from you to run a sale? Or did your class ever mention that while creating a sysadmin password, you would have three nervous people chatting in your ear, making it nearly impossible for you to remember the password you just created? I doubt it.

Being a consultant isn’t easy, but there are ways to keep your sanity in check. Jack Wallen, writing for TechRepublic Premium, presents some tips that can help.

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5: Leave work at work

This is the most difficult aspect of the job. When you have a challenging task hanging over your head, the default is to take that challenge home with you in the form of an obsession. When you leave work, leave work. If you take work home with you — especially if it becomes a borderline obsessive thought — it will burn you out.

When I get home from work, I have a ritual. I take off my watch and set it on my desk. I don’t put that watch back on my wrist until Monday morning. I bet you can guess the metaphor in this case. But believe it or not, it works for me.

You can come up with your own symbolic routine that helps you leave your work at work. It’ll save you from burning out and ending a promising career early.

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TIME SAVED: Crafting this content required 10 hours of dedicated writing, editing, research, and design.