Setting Boundaries for Better Work-Life Balance

Those who have been following my posts this winter know that I’ve been struggling with feeling stressed, overworked and out of sync with who I am and who I want to be. I’ve been working on that in the last couple of months to find a way that allows me to pursue my need for financial security without compromising my mental health and feeling like I’m losing myself in the process. 

This is probably not something that I will ‘solve’ in a few weeks. I’ve got the feeling it will be a lifelong learning journey. But, I’ve discovered a few things that have made a big, positive difference for me in the last few weeks, and I thought I’d share them in case they are valuable for others who face similar challenges. 

There are three key things that have been valuable to me:

1. Setting boundaries

2. Having clear goals and a plan

3. Dealing better with stress

I planned to cover all three in this blog posts, but then it got so long that I decided to do one for each, starting with boundaries today.

Setting Boundaries

Setting boundaries has been a challenge for me what it comes to work. I take a lot of pride in my work and want to do a great job. I not only hate the idea of letting people down, I actually hate the idea of not impressing and overdelivering. Getting positive feedback and feeling valued is important for my self-esteem. 

However, this often results in me working way more than I should, struggling to switch off from work, and feeling stressed, drained and unmotivated to do anything but work. I know I have to overcome that if I wanted a better life balance for the long-term.

I need to learn to say "no", and I need to set boundaries.  

And that's more important than ever right now. The last two summers work slowed down naturally, and I was only in supporting roles. This year, I've got a lead role with one of my clients where others are reliant on me managing projects, planning work and keeping things on track. In other words, if I want a better balance, I need to take action – it won't just happen automatically like it did last year. 

So, I decided that, for summer, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday will be my main workdays. I set clear boundaries with my clients that I'm only available for meetings on those three days and that I may be offline on the other days.

Funnily enough, I found this really hard to do and felt very nervous about telling my clients, but they are all totally fine with it. Just shows again that I worry too much :-)

It means that those three days will be busy workdays, but I thought about it and decided I'd rather have three full-on days and then four days off. I've always been an all-or-nothing person, so this suits me.

I do think I will be doing some work on the other days. I do enjoy most of the work I do and, if I have the time, why not do some. The main goal was not to have meetings and expectations on these days – mainly because I want to have the freedom to explore parts of the country that might not have internet coverage.

Having made this step has been a massive weight off my shoulder.

Now I know that I will have four days a week that are 'mine' where I can do whatever I want without having to worry about being contactable and checking my emails. 

But I realised that setting boundaries with my clients won’t do much unless I set some boundaries for myself as well. At the end of the day, it will be my actions more than anyone else’s that determine whether I find a better balance. There is no point in telling clients that I’m offline on Mondays and Fridays if I then check messages every five minutes and worry about responding. 

So, I set some boundaries for myself.  

A big one is that I've committed to turning work-related notifications off when I'm not working. I've noticed that just knowing an email or message is waiting for me, creates anxiety and the fear that I will let people down if I don't respond right away. If I don’t know there are messages for me, I won’t stress about replying to them 

However, I do think that I have a responsibility towards my clients not to hold things up if it can be avoided. So if I have coverage, I will check messages twice a day on Mondays and Fridays even if I’m technically not working. But in-between, I will turn all notifications off. 

Another boundary I've set is that if I do work on non-work days (Fri – Mon) it will be for a maximum of 3 hours per day to make sure that the majority of the day will be filled with non-work things. And I will only do tasks I genuinely enjoy on the non-work days (luckily, my job involves quite a few of those).

And finally, I set a boundary that I won’t work before 7:30am. I generally like to start work early as I’m the most productive first thing in the morning. However, what happened this winter is that working so much and starting earlier every day, pushed something else out of my life: Reading! 

A few years ago, I started a habit to read non-fiction for at least 30 minutes every morning. As I got busy this winter, I stopped doing that and instead started working at 7am or sometimes even earlier. I hadn't realised how much I missed reading in the morning until I started again a couple of weeks ago. I usually read about self-discovery and personal-growth related topics in the morning and, now that I'm back to doing it, I realised how much it inspires me to stick to my goals and be the best version of myself throughout the day. By setting a boundary that I won't work before 7:30, I make sure that I have time to read every morning.

So those are my main boundaries. Now it’s up to me to enforce them! 

And I guess now you see why I had to split this into three blog posts :-)

In the next one, I will share how setting goals and making a plan has helped me find a better balance mentally.

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