“Like many people, I have been working from home since the pandemic began and feeling overwhelmed by the new normal of all-day meetings and an endless number of emails and messages. I like my job but need to find a different way to balance everything. How can I carve out time for myself during the workday?”
- Obviously overcommitted
This is a timely question in our current workdays filled with zoom meetings, slack messages, texts, emails and trying to stay sane as we navigate year three of a pandemic. Work has integrated so much with life that it can be difficult to discern which is which and even harder to draw boundaries.
The solutions will vary based on your role and how your team gets work done. For example you would be doing yourself and the team a disservice if you chose Wednesday afternoons to carve out time for yourself and that conflicts with your team’s weekly meeting.
The first step in tackling this problem is to get a handle on what is truly important for you to attend. Look at your team norms and patterns for meetings and ceremonies. If they are inconsistent today, make an offer to create a schedule so that you (and the rest of the group) know ahead of time what to expect. If possible, try to cluster like-things to reduce context switching within a day. Best case you can get all the conversations about project X to happen on the same day and project Y on the following day.
Once you know what needs to happen to get your core work done, assess the rest of the meetings and things you spend your time on. Get rid of or decline things that don’t add value. Be ruthless.
Examples:
That weekly series with the person you met and liked at orientation that isn’t really helping you any longer [make it ad hoc vs. weekly]
The 50 person meeting where you always turn off your camera and zone out [decline - ask someone else to send you important notes]
The project catch-up that could be 15 minutes but is scheduled for 30 so the group just chatters through the rest of the time [reduce to 15 minutes]
Now you should have a little more time available on the calendar (hopefully!). Make a list for yourself of what things you ideally want to have happen in a day, week or month. Is it a weekly yoga class over your lunch hour? 90 minutes on Monday mornings to get your schedule planned? 2 hours on Friday afternoon to wind down and wrap up the week before you leave? A 30 minute walk each afternoon?
Whatever your things are, make them a priority and schedule them now with ‘unavailable’ blocks on your calendar. Recurring, forever blocks for what you know you need to be your best. Then don’t move or schedule over these times unless it is truly urgent or you are choosing to do so.
Monday morning prep time and Friday afternoon wrap-up time were always important to me, and I would block them off and fight tooth and nail to keep those time blocks because I knew that not having them would negatively impact my overall effectiveness. Yes, at times I would take a call or do a meeting during those times because I agreed to it (and would then make a tradeoff elsewhere). But it was a choice and not the default - that is the key.
Make the default the thing you want to happen most of the time; the exception can be deployed when needed.
Two final thoughts on how to create time for yourself during the workday. First - don’t schedule all the meetings that you talk about, instead put the onus on the other person. Joe wants to chat about his project, great - Joe can find and schedule a time and if he doesn’t that means it wasn’t so important after all.
And second, when you do have a break, actually give your brain a break. Walk away from your computer and don’t have notifications popping up on your phone. You won’t feel like you actually got a brain break if you do it in a half-ass fashion.