How do you maintain a healthy work-life balance? How do you set boundaries when people you work with try to violate that balance?

About twice a month, I’ll get someone coming to me to ask for career advice. I’m starting to collect the more common questions and my thoughts on them. I’m putting these together as a series of blog posts under the tag CareerPlusPlus.

This is one of the questions I don’t get asked as often as others, but it is one I think frequently about. I see a lot of people with terrible work life balance, and at some of my jobs I’ve been that person.

If your goal is to have a healthy work-life balance, let’s first figure out what that means for you. What works for me may not work for you, and that’s okay.

To be concrete, what an appropriate work-life balance for me has meant at times:

• There was a year where one of my children was gravely ill. During this time the appropriate work life balance looked like me putting in the bare minimum number of hours I could. I was open with my manager about what was going on. I was underperforming and I accepted that. I was ready for an adverse evaluation that never came.
• There was a time after graduating from grad school where I needed a break from academia. I took a job that was explicitly a 40 hr work week. It was an in-person office job. I didn’t have a work laptop. The second I stepped out the door of the office, I didn’t give it a second thought until the next morning.
• There were a few years where I took this really exciting new job working with a wide range of new technologies. I was excited to go to work, both for the ability to spend time with coworkers I enjoyed and because I loved learning about the new tech. I would frequently think about the projects in the evenings and took up reading journal articles at night. I was working about 50-60 hours a week but it didn’t feel like work. It was a pleasure.

The point being, what works for you today may not work for someone else tomorrow. Times change, and so do we.

Setting Boundaries

Recommendation: Try to decide what exactly, in objective terms, work-life balance means for you right now.

Is this some number of hours you’ll work? What would it look like in the other hours? How frequently would you be willing to go beyond the ideal? Be realistic.

That’s the easy part. The hard part is discipline. Setting boundaries is a skill that takes practice. Here are the things I’ve found helpful.

• When I go on family outings, I leave the laptop at home.
• Remove slack and email from your phone, or at least make the app hidden from your home screen. I do the latter. I can still access in a pinch, but it takes more effort than hitting a button based on habit.
• When you go on PTO, sign out of everything.
• When someone asks for something after hours or right at the end of the day, tell them when you will get to it. My go to answer is something along the lines of, “I’m heading out soon, but I can address that tomorrow morning.”
  • If they ask you again before you said you will do it, reiterate when you told them you would get to it. Some people you have to do this to many times before they get the message.

What do you do when others don’t respect your boundaries?

I apply the hula-hoop principle.

If I hold a hula-hoop at about waist level around my body, I remind myself that everything I can control is within that hula-hoop. I can control me and my actions. Everything else is outside my locus of control.

What this means in practice.

• Don’t answer. If someone keeps sending you texts or other messages or requests outside of reasonable work hours, do not respond. You can’t stop them from sending the messages, probably.
  • If you always respond, they will keep doing it.
  • People respond to the pressure applied to them, good or bad.
• Remind people kindly with clear, objective criteria. Like I put above, just say something along the lines of, “I just saw your message. I’m trying to maintain a healthy work-life balance, so I do not check messages in the evenings. I’ll start work on that now.” It’s awkward. A moment of awkward is better than fretting all night when you’re supposed to be enjoying an evening of Star Trek but all you can think of is work.
• Leave. If you’re working somewhere that they do not respect you enough to uphold clear, objective boundaries, then leave.
  • I know this can be scary.
  • You’re worth it.

What if I get a negative evaluation because of this?

It might happen. I believe in being completely honest. There are managers and coworkers out there who will hold this against you. They’ll say something about not being a team player.

If you encounter this, I bet there are other signs of a toxic work environment. You should think carefully about how important this job is to you.

It’s not life or death, probably.

I have had a life or death job. We had no choice – we had to push ourselves to our very limits, physically and mentally. None of us came back from those experiences the same.

If your job really is life or death, you probably need help more than what my simple blog post can provide. If you’re a fellow veteran, I recommend reaching out to the VA Hospital.

For the vast majority of us, this isn’t the case. I see people creating false urgency all over the place. You can choose to give in to that or to set a boundary.

There are other jobs.

Your coworkers are not your family.

The good news is…

You are not alone. If you’re struggling with balance, probably others are in your company too. Take the first step. Log out right now. Set boundaries. Stick to them. Others will follow.