One last thought on delegation: be mindful of the delegate’s situation. At work, check to see that the new task won’t cause the employee to drop other balls. Help the employee assess his or her responsibilities to see if he or she needs to drop, redefine, or delegate other tasks. At home, make sure your family members have the tools to do the job. Delegation may take an upfront time investment, but it can free up buckets of time down the road.
Create (and Keep) Your Boundaries
Boundaries are our own “lines in the sand” that help us keep other people and things from encroaching on our space. They also help us not to encroach on others. Boundaries are excellent tools for reigning in perfectionism and dealing with an imperfect world. When boundaries are lacking, everything can feel out of control. Having boundaries does not mean that you can’t occasionally take work home or let the lines between work and home blur a little. You just need to make sure that it is a conscious choice.
How do you know what your boundaries are? As you get to know and listen to yourself, your boundaries often emerge. Other times, you don’t know you have created a boundary until it feels wrong to step over it.
Sheila negotiated a situation with her employer to have flexible hours so that she could be home early enough to pick up her daughter from the bus stop after school. She got to work between 6:00 a.m. and 6:15 a.m. so that she would be able to leave by 2:45 p.m. She isn’t a morning person, but felt that getting up early was a worthwhile adjustment so she could be with her daughter after school. She also realized that late meetings or last-minute telephone calls would occasionally prevent her from leaving on time, so she worked out a back-up plan with her neighbor for those days. Things went pretty well for a month or two but then the back-up plan became the norm and her neighbor was picking up her daughter three or four days each week. Sheila started to feel angry and resentful about her early morning start when she wasn’t getting the payoff she had envisioned. These feelings made her realize that she had a boundary — she just hadn’t nailed it down. She now knew that having her neighbor pick up her daughter three to four days a week was too much and this shed light on where the line should be in order for her not to feel angry and resentful. She decided that her line in the sand was calling upon her neighbor a maximum of one day per week and a new boundary was born.
Sometimes other people help us define our boundaries. Beth remembers an incident that had a whopping impact on how she set her boundaries. She had agreed to meet her sister at a restaurant after work. Beth’s last meeting of the day at work was running long and she kept anxiously looking at her watch. A key internal customer was talking endlessly. Although it had been an impromptu meeting late in the day that she did not have to attend, Beth didn’t honor her own boundaries and get up and leave. Finally, the meeting ended and she rushed to her car and drove aggressively to the restaurant. By this time, she was about 30 minutes late and her cell phone rang. It was her sister who calmly informed her that she was tired of waiting — her time was valuable too — and she had left the restaurant. Beth was frustrated, embarrassed, and angry with herself for not leaving on time. But she realized her sister wasn’t being unreasonable. This incident helped her create a new boundary between work and her personal life.
What makes a boundary beautiful? When it empowers you and improves your quality of life. Whether a need for a boundary is emerging on its own or being triggered by an event with someone else, the six steps for creating beautiful boundaries are the same:
Get out of the passive/victim mentality
Let’s say you are finishing up the latest revisions on a major project. Your level of stress and frustration has skyrocketed because it has to be done by tomorrow morning and the constant stream of interruptions is making it impossible to get any work done. With personal plans for the evening, you don’t want to be working late. Since this type of scenario happens quite frequently, your frustration is even higher.
It’s very easy to say “my time is not my own,” or “there is no way I can control my workload.” This is a tempting thought pattern but one that needs to be broken if you are going to make changes. Who is in charge of your time and your life? You always have choices even if they are choices you are not willing to make. Shift your thinking from “I can’t believe this is happening to me” to “what can I change?” The possibilities will be more likely to emerge once you have let go of the victim mentality.
Diffuse the emotion
While anger, frustration, and hurt can be clues that lead you to establish your boundaries, you need to diffuse them so you can plan an effective boundary and implement it well. You have probably run into situations where others have let their emotions interfere with managing their boundaries. The classic example is a sales clerk who tells you with an attitude, “I can’t help you right now because I am off in five minutes.” It’s not the schedule we object to, but the way the sales clerk projected her emotion about her boundary. So before you define and implement your boundary, talk to someone about your feelings, role-play with a friend or partner, or write in a journal.
Follow the pain to the problem
Before you can define a boundary, you have to clearly understand the problem. In the case of the heavy workload that is bleeding into your personal time, you feel like you don’t have control over anything and it impacts your satisfaction with your work. This feeling of frustration and lack of control are the pain, and the pain means there is a problem. Writing down the problem is a great way to make sure you have clearly identified the true issue. Perhaps the real issue is how you schedule your day with meetings right up until the end of the day with no time for wrap up. So, one idea would be to try not to book any meetings after 4:00 p.m. unless they meet certain criteria.
Decide on a “trial boundary”
In the case of the frustrating workload, a trial boundary might be to stay late only one day a week. To do this, you will need to define the criteria that would cause you to stay late. Is it a certain project or assignment that is critical to your boss? You will need to strategize on how you will be selective and what will happen with the work you aren’t going to stay late to finish. Naturally, this takes some planning and may include your overall work priorities and responsibilities. You may have to negotiate with your boss or others but remember that the frustration that got you to this point isn’t healthy for your company either.
Create a boundary support system
Recruit a friend or coworker to be your sounding board and support system when you are implementing a new boundary. Just like new habits take time to develop, new boundaries will feel awkward at first. You may even feel guilty about implementing them, but remember that you are worth it. If it is a reasonable boundary and it is implemented well, it will be a win-win for you and your employer. In most cases, those around you will respect you more for having a boundary.
Implement the “trial boundary” and then evaluate it in 30 days
Successful implementation is the result of all the planning you have done in the previous steps. It also means that you inform others of your boundary with tact and diplomacy. Let’s say you work a compressed workweek and someone is trying to set up a meeting with you on your day off. Instead of saying angrily, “That is my day off!” You could say, “I’m not available that day, would the following day work?”
Once you have implemented the boundary, don’t consider the process complete. Jot notes in your calendar to indicate which days you stuck to the boundary and which days you didn’t. Reflect back on the times when you couldn’t stay with the boundary. Was the boundary too stringent or is there something you are doing to sabotage your success? Debriefing on your own, or better yet, with your boundary support system, will help you to correct any problems.
Although many of the examples given for boundaries were work related, these steps work