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How has your attitude towards working “off hours” changed in the past year or so? Do you try to only be on call/reachable during 9–5 (and put up snooze notices or the like during other hours), or, for example, to only send emails when the time stamp will show a normal working hour instead of, say, 3 a.m.? What work-life boundaries are you putting up to keep work from encroaching on your life in general when you work from home?
{related: how to keep your work life separate from your personal life}
I started thinking about this because I was updating our older post on answering work email at home. Ever since Blackberries and smartphones became ubiquitous, a growing number of workplaces expect you to be responsive to work emails and messages beyond typical working hours. Given the amount of people who have been working from home over the past year, I fear all work-life boundaries have been obliterated… but I hope not. So let's discuss!
{related: how to turn off work mode with boundary rituals when you work from home}
Some of the questions we asked the readers in the older post are relevant today:
Do you have any tips, tricks, or hacks for dealing with this growing problem of being expected to answer work email at home, e.g., Do Not Disturb settings in Slack, automatic shut-off times, or even Boomerang for Gmail (on the sending side, at least)?
Work/life balance aside, do you think it looks unprofessional to clients and others to send or reply to email on nights and weekends — have you ever thought to yourself, WTH is this person replying to this at 3 in the morning? (For those of you who have coworkers spread around the country and globe, how much has that affected your answers?)
So let's hear it, readers — what are your thoughts? How has work encroached on your home life in 2020 and 2021? What are the necessary work-life boundaries when you work from home?
Stock photo (yin/yang game board showing “life” and “work” separated, with blue game piece balanced between them) via Shutterstock / viviamo.
Anonymous
I posted about this the other day, but maintaining boundaries is easier for me than it seems to be for others. I stop right on the dot every day (and manage my workload accordingly), I don’t give out my cell phone number, I don’t check email on the weekends, and I don’t make a big announcement about it. I just do my thing and do great work while I’m at work. There are other people in my office who check email at all hours and respond to every request like it’s an emergency, but they also report feeling very stressed and wanting to change those habits.
A few things that help: enforcing your own boundaries quietly and not expecting others to respect or even know about them automatically; having hobbies/interests outside of work to give you more of a reason to stop working; removing your work email from your phone; clarifying deadlines when someone asks you for something instead of assuming by default that it needs to be ASAP; working with your manager to make sure your workload is challenging/interesting, but manageable…
Email Off
Removing my work email from your phone is the best thing I did for my mental health in 2020. Considering that I can just log into the browser if an ACTUAL emergency pops up, I doubt that I’ll ever go back to having my work email consume my personal space like that ever again. If they want all hours phone access, they’ll have to get me a company phone. Otherwise, emails are for my laptop only.
bellatrix
“clarifying deadlines when someone asks you for something instead of assuming by default that it needs to be ASAP; ”
So much this. I have terrible balance, but I have gotten very good at saying, “I have the afternoon blocked off already for XYZ task, but I can do that first thing in the morning.” I tell my younger teammates to do this ALL THE TIME. Sometimes it’s about setting your own boundaries, but sometimes someone’s “right away” means “by Friday” and not “in 45 minutes.” If they won’t be clear about what they mean, I will be clear for them.
anon
This is great advice, but will not work with all jobs/industries/environments etc. I do think that the concept of setting boundaries is really important but would add this: for those of us with more demanding jobs that won’t allow this, setting boundaries on an ad-hoc basis (e.g., today, I am off at 5, this weekend, I am not working or will only work for 2 hours on Sat. am) as the fluid situations allow can really work. That is what I have been trying to lean into. It is not a panacea, but it helps and i feel like i get more time “off” and that i am more present with my family.
Anon
My desk is three feet from my bed, so not great Bob. I don’t look at emails on weekends and evenings (but my job doesn’t require it). I put away all my desk clutter in off hours so I don’t have to look at it when I’m not working. But that damn monitor is still always looming.
MidnightLady
You can throw a nice scarf/other piece of textile over the monitor if you want.
bellatrix
I am terrible at work/life balance and I have been for years. Pandemic/WFH has only made it worse. But I’m leaning into it and making it work for me instead of trying to resist it: I take a break to walk my son through his math homework when I need to, and I make up for it at night when the rest of my household is on their screens or asleep anyway. My work requires focus but it’s very task-based, not collaborative, and the tasks themselves are pretty short, so it works well in the spread-out type of schedule.
Cornellian
I got in to the habit of having a drink everyday when work was over as a delineator. Do not recommend!
anon
+1 to enforcing your own boundaries. my company is a global one, and I receive requests to join meeting at 4.30am, 6am, 11pm, I just decline, and if they need me they reschedule, if they don’t, it means I wasn’t truly important for that decision-making. I see colleagues who do accept them because they fear they will look bad, and then become irritable and complain they have no life …
ACB
I concur 100% with Anonymous, I just… stop working when I am scheduled to stop working. They pay me for 37.5 hours a week, and that’s what they get. Every once in a while I have to log on at midnight to update web content for legal reasons, but I just sleep in a little the next day. There’s only so much work that can be done in one day, what are all of these people doing?!
Heather
My work-life balance is gone. Home is the office. There is no place to go. Working with international governments and partners means answering at odd hours anyways, and virtual school means I am working earlier in the morning or later in the evening or catching up on Sundays. My husband has had to go his place of work and can’t work at home.
katie
Hello! check out my blog https://www.thesundayvlog.com/ for poems on gratitude, family, struggles, and more.
Mary
I’ve had an increase in the number of meetings on my calendar since we were sent home just under a year ago. Its not uncommon for me to have back to back meetings from 9:30-12 and 1:00-5:00, and sometimes meetings during the lunch hour too. If I don’t work after 5pm, I usually am thinking about work post-log-off because I don’t have a lot of space to think about work during the workday.
Pandemic labor lawsuits are coming
I set timers and then literally get up and leave my work devices in my office.