I don’t know about you, but my working life before kids looked a lot different than it does now.
I’d happily stay a bit late in the office on the reg, pick up a few emails on the weekends as I saw fit, and often did late calls with other timezones. Working like this seemed easy to me because it had barely any impact on the rest of my life.
Fast-forward to going back to work after maternity leave and my goodness, the same approach to work just can’t happen.
No, I can’t stay late in the office, because I have to pick my son up from childcare.
No, I can’t do any emails on the weekends because trying to concentrate on literally anything with a marauding toddler in the room is impossible.
No, I can’t do calls outside my time zone because that’s when I’m doing:
- Dinner
- Bathtime
- Bedtime
- Actually getting the chance to talk to my husband interruption-free for five minutes
- Going to bed early because I’m shattered from the constant roly poly of mum-work-mum-work duties
I realise this now, but I don’t think I had a good handle on it when I first went back to work after maternity leave.
I’d usually manage to leave work on time for the childcare pickup, but there were definitely times when the edges of work and parenting and home and me time would be very blurry. That might work fine for some people, but I found it difficult.
I’d agree to calls at times that were actually tricky for me, and then feel stressed about them.
I’d “just have a quick check” of emails at 8pm and then go down a rabbit-hole of dealing with work stuff and not have any quality time with my husband.
I’d stress myself out trying to get work done during nap time, when really I should have been getting some rest myself.
I realised that the muscle memory of my people pleasing habits was running the show. I needed to be much better at boundary-setting, with other people sure, but mainly with myself!
These were the things I put in place to change my behaviours:
- I added unavailable time to my work and home calendars
- I set up an auto-response for times when I was not working
- I set ‘quiet time’ on my phone work apps
- I set a ‘sleep mode’ on my whole phone
- I got into the habit of asking “when do you need this by?”
If you want the details on these – here they are:
- Adding unavailable time to my work and home calendars
I went through my work diary and added recurring appointments for all of the times I’d be unavailable, so that I had a really clear visual outline of when I was and wasn’t able to do work things.
I’m talking morning drop-off, a bit of time for lunch, leaving the office for pick-up, dinner/bath/bedtime, all of it. Without the visual map of where my time was committed, I could be tempted into booking a meeting which actually wasn’t suitable for my schedule. With all of my unavailable time blocked out, it was really easy to see where appointments would clash.
- Setting up an auto-response
As I didn’t work the ‘standard’ hours when I first went back to work after maternity leave, I worried that people would see a delayed response from me as slacking.
By making sure I had an out of office response on my emails and Teams, I could better relax in the knowledge that I was managing expectations of anyone trying to get in touch with me.
(I did also have to set a reminder on my phone to remind me to actually turn on the auto responses too!)
- Setting quiet time on my phone work apps
There are plenty of times that I find it useful to have my work emails and Teams on my phone. Waiting at the dentist? No problem, I can still catch up with my team on the go.
The downside was that if I happened to see a little notification of a new email coming in at 9pm, I’d end up checking it. Which usually meant I’d end up responding. Which was usually a gateway to more working… (for free by the way – extra work did not mean extra money.)
The Microsoft Outlook mobile app has a ‘quiet time’ setting, where you can specify regular periods of time where no notifications come through, so I turned this on for all of my non-working hours slots.
If I don’t get a notification about new emails or chats, I don’t even know they’re there to worry about.
- Setting sleep mode on my phone
I’m an android phone user so I’ll confess I don’t know if the iphone has something similar (it must do)… I’ve set a sleep mode on my phone from 9.30pm every evening.
This prevents me from accessing most of my apps and turns my screen to greyscale – giving me a great visual signal that it’s time for winding down and definitely not time for ‘doing stuff’, like work.
Sleep is such an important part of restoring yourself I’m trying to do anything I can to protect it!
- “When do you need this by?”
This is a great question to get in the habit of asking when people come at you with a task.
My instinct is usually to get the task done straight away, just because I’ve been asked, but not necessarily because it’s the most important or urgent thing I should be doing.
By asking this question you force the task-giver to think about how important or urgent this really is too, and usually the answer is not as urgent as you think.
I put it on a post-it note stuck to my screen so I’d remember to ask it often.
These are the tools I’ve used to help set up my boundaries and make my juggle struggle easier.
I think they’re especially important when you return to work from Maternity leave so that you set a precedent quickly for what people can expect from you. However, you can start using them at any time – even if you’ve been a working parent for ages.
The real key is to set them and stick to them.
What are your tips for establishing boundaries? Let me know in the comments!
Juggle Struggle blog 