On the phone this morning with friend and fellow entrepreneur, Lisa, a topic that is kryptonite to many of us came up: work and personal boundaries.
Boundaries are blurry
Lisa was telling the story of a coaching client who wasn’t available during Lisa’s coaching hours – and who pitched that they meet at 8pm on a Monday instead. Eager to help the client, Lisa said yes, even though Monday is her standing date night with her partner. The first time she asked to reschedule, her partner was gracious and understanding. The second time Lisa asked to reschedule, she felt really bad. That got her attention.
“I was violating my own values,” she explained. “My partner is one of my top priorities, and I wasn’t honoring that commitment to myself or to him.” In her enthusiasm to be a good business-woman and coach to her client, Lisa lost clarity around her the boundaries she had drawn alongside her values. The result? She felt it. She felt it bad.
Do you feel like you’re working constantly?
There’s a work trend going on right now: the expectation that you are on all the time. Despite many helpful articles and good intentions around work-life balance, many of us struggle to leave work at work. How many times have you gotten a work email well before 8 am and well after 6 pm? This is particularly true of entrepreneurs. When you are your job, the lines between business and personal get blurry. Running all aspects of a business obscures the boundary between “work” and “not work.” But this happens in traditional jobs as well. Lisa recalled that when working in an ad agency, “there was an expectation that you were always on, always answerable to the client, always able to drop everything to fix client’s problem.” I am guilty of this. I write emails late at night. I check messages while waiting in line. There’s a constant, low-level sense that any spare moment could be used to get ahead with work. It can leave you feeling exhausted all the time.
Lisa noticed that women at the ad agency, particularly those with young children, had very clear boundaries after work. They left at 5 pm and did no more work until the next morning. One of Lisa’s female colleagues remarked, “I used to resent women who had the ready excuse of young children to leave work on time and completely. But then I realized I don’t need children to create boundaries around work. My time off work can be equally sacred, even if my commitment is to yoga or to Netflix. It doesn’t matter what it is. It matters that you’re clear that it’s a priority, and that you draw boundaries so your priorities can be honored.” You don’t have to follow the example of working like a hamster on a wheel. You can draw boundaries between work and your personal life. You can, and you should.
You need time off
Despite our cultural emphasis on working all the time, we know it’s not healthy or sustainable. Time spent not focusing on works allows our brains to synthesize information and find solutions. Like working out a muscle, the strengthening occurs not while lifting weights but during the recovery period after a workout. It is critical to give our minds off time from focusing. Additionally, time spent not working allows us to be better friends, partners, and community members.
This is especially important to do as entrepreneurs and small business owners. We do not have the structure of 9-to-5 (even if that structure is nominal). It’s tempting to want to wring productivity out of every spare moment. A lot rides on you when you run a business. A lot of people rely on you. But this break-neck pace is not sustainable. And we cannot produce high-quality work if we’re always going 90 miles an hour with our hair on fire. In the absence of a structure that starts and ends the workday, we are responsible for drawing those boundaries ourselves. Although we may be surrounded by other entrepreneurs who write emails at 11:55 pm or send us text messages at 6:30 am, we do not have to follow suit. I hope that by drawing boundaries and respecting them, we will set an example that others will follow.
If you’re at a loss for how to create boundaries, consider:
- Take a Sabbatical: Lisa and I have a dear friend who never, ever works on Sunday. She takes the day completely off to preserve her sanity, her marriage, to recharge her batteries and give her mind a break. Does she miss some opportunities because of it? Perhaps. But we can never take advantage of all the opportunities. If we’re going to miss some, they may as well fall on the same day each week so at least we know when and where we will get our time off.
- Schedule it: Many entrepreneurs are highly scheduled, to ensure that work is delivered promptly and all our responsibilities get time. Make your non-work commitments an equally important part of your schedule. Block off certain evenings or certain hours during the day to not check emails or answer the phone and instead to see your partner, take a long walk, or in some other way give time to your other priorities.
- Turn off your email: Stop checking it. Just stop. Even if you think to yourself, “but I could get a jump-start on tomorrow if I just delete some things real fast…” JUST STOP. Email is a time suck and idly deleting or scrolling through messages is inefficient. Devote time to tackling email, or turn it off and ignore it. (Note: I recently turned off Push notifications for email on my phone. It makes a big difference!)
- Use Boomerang: Perhaps 5:30 am or 11:30 pm is a great time for you to go gangbusters on your email. Consider scheduling the messages you write to send at 8 AM, instead of sending them in real time. This signals to your recipients that you conduct business during business hours. It also means you won’t receive any replies from other late-night entrepreneurs, thus creating more email for you to deal with.
- Turn off your phone: It is amazing what it does to your focus and attention when your phone is off!
- Forget about “multitasking”: I used to try and check emails or read articles while cooking dinner. But literally everyone knows by now that multitasking doesn’t work. It splits your attention so you perform worse on both tasks than if you did one at a time, successively. Draw a boundary around your activities. Have “work reading” time and “cooking time.” For heaven’s sake, do not try to combine them!
Sometimes I think to myself, Eva, you’re living the dream! You work for yourself. You can make money in your pajamas. You can take time off whenever you want! You did not start this venture to attend networking events every evening, live in email purgatory, or learn about a new software while cooking risotto. You need to draw some lines. It’s true. There are tremendous benefits to working for ourselves, but it takes a lot of discipline and attention to keep the work from overtaking us. There is something wrong with the expectation and culture of working all the time. I want our work culture to be more humane. But I am not patient. So I will draw my lines — starting now. We can draw boundaries between work and our personal lives that we respect. The clients that want to work with us will respect them, too. And our unwavering commitment to ourselves and our priorities will become an example to others.
