Two Alpha Males settle a boundary dispute by mikebaird
I suck at setting boundaries. Unlike the seals over there, I don’t do such a good job at defending my territory. I’ll pretty much give up my ground to anyone who asks for it.
Over the years, I’ve simultaneously gotten worse and better at boundary setting. Personally, I’m much better at saying No, I can’t do that for you/with you/etc. But professionally I’ve gotten much worse at it.
And I still have a hard time saying no to my mother, even though I do it pretty often…
My biggest problem is my BlackBerry.
I check, and respond to, emails at all hours. I wait with baited breath for the little red light to blink. It’s always blinking. I’ve forever got my thumb on that little trackball… click, roll, click, roll. Read, forward, delete, file… I can do it all from my little technological wonder. Check Facebook. Take and post photos. Video George spinning in circles waiting for his dinner (fascinating, right?) It’s handy.
For a long time, I’ve worn my minor BB addiction as something of a badge of honor. I’ve let the handiness of the contraption overshadow the hit on my real-life life allow me to pretend there there aren’t equal and opposite reactions. How can I possibly give the real-life people standing in front of me the attention they deserve when I’ve got my BB 2 inches from my nose at all times?
And do I really want to be setting the expectation with my colleagues and clients that they’ll come first… always?
A List Apart’s recent article – sent to me by a colleague – hits the nail on the head:
Set boundaries and expectations
The days of the 9-to-5 job are gone and the boundaries between work and home are blurred to the point of non-existence. We’re expected to be available nearly all the time, and the problem is often exacerbated for freelancers or anyone who works primarily from a home office where the only divide between being “at home” and being “at work” is a single door or a flight of stairs.
It’s not a badge of honor to work 80 hours a week or to answer e-mail or to Twitter at all hours of the night. Ask yourself: Have you set sufficient boundaries between your job and your life outside of work? Are you guarding those boundaries?
Although clients may choose to leave you messages and send e-mail at all hours, it’s up to you to set expectations about your responsiveness. As soon as you leave yourself open to responding to e-mails at 10 o’clock at night, you set a precedent that can be hard to take back.
No more.
I’m putting a stake in the ground. Or at least, I’m going to try to, lest I near crazy land (or burnout)…
I’m going to attempt to use my BlackBerry as a phone only when I’m not working. I’m going to leave it at home when Megan and I go out to dinner. And gasp I’m going to stop responding to emails in the middle of the night.
Time will tell how well this little plan of mine pans out…
Love this post- I’m sharing it with my husband who works from home and is a junkie to his Blackberry….24 x 7….
(ps found you through Bossy..)
I so hear this. I’m not quite as popular as you are, but my little red light blinks often enough to annoy me. So much that I’m getting rid of the Blackberry sooner rather than later and going back to a simpler phone that I literally can’t Facebook/Twitter/email/surf easily on. I’ll always text, but the boundaries of leaving it at home to go to dinner with Megan are ones that I’ll adopt as soon as there’s a woman to go out to dinner with in my life.
(I found you through Bossy too.)
Glad and relieved to see this post. Let me know how it goes. Actually, I know it works because I sent you three emails tonight and no response. Yay! I didn’t know the red blinky meant I had a message. I swear I thought it was an indicator for network connectivity. Thanks – it will now haunt me too.
This is a great post. Admitting that you have a problem is the first step! I’ll be rooting for you:)
So far, so good… I did check it a couple of times last night from the couch, but Megan was in the office doing something…
I’ve successfully not checked it for 2 days now. Not at all on Wednesday night when we went out to dinner with friends, and then only 2x last night. Which is a big improvement…
Thanks for all the support… and woohoo to the Bossy folks!
Be careful of the “checking when no-one is looking tactic”…you can start to get really good at sneaky/stealth tactics on top of other problem (checking too much). I speak from experience.
Idgy, I believe I learned some of my best stealth BB checking moves from you… and yes, those tricks are hard to unlearn. Baby steps…
will this free up more time for the running project?
Bo: the running project is sort of on hold… or rather, I’ve fallen off of the wagon. But today, we start Jillian Michaels’ 30 Day Shred. I’m a little scared…
dont forsake the running project! I am not familar with the “30 day shred” that you speak of, and in a quick google search i found many websites ready to sell me the software, but not many that told me all about it. Hope it treats you well. I have started the “RI Rock Gym” project myself, it is a good one.
The red blinky light elicits a Pavlovian response. I’m developing ways of making the blinking stop while trying not to actually read any email, but it only works some of the time. Otherwise, I’m reading things that I should not be reading while on vacation and fuzzing up my head with “how do I read this and not respond right now” dilemmas. Is there a way to make the red blinky not signify new email – at least for a few days?
Email and vacations do not mix well. We have an expectation of near-instantaneous response in our culture, so we have to put bots on to auto-respond in our absence. Unfortunately, the bots don’t keep the emails from arriving in the inbox so, rather than return to work with a reasonable expectation of a few calls to make, we return to mountains of emails to sort through and triage. “I know so-and-so is away, but I’ll email anyway and they can get back to me when they return.” The message just sits there waiting, or in the case of the BlackBerry user, it blinks there until you make it go away. A hundred tiny decisions a day. I remember when if you called someone and they didn’t answer, you shrugged it off and called again later. Of course, that was sometimes annoying, but there was an understanding that other people have other lives and are not always available. There was that inherent delay that put perspective on the urgency of a person’s needs–if you reeeeally need to speak to me, you are going to have to track me down in the physical world. Is your need to communicate so urgent that you are ready to drive across town/track me down face to face? Some folks blame the telephone for putting us on this slippery slope, but the culprit is really the answering machine.
I applaud the boundary setting. Keep up the good work!
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