How to Set Better Boundaries When Working Remotely

Photo by Ketut Subiyanto from Pexels

Boundaries are a great way to reclaim your time, and then we’ll help you with all the other habits and little hacks we talked about in this piece.

Boundaries can be physical, such as create finding another room to do your work or your time snacks, but they can also be mental. When it comes to creating boundaries, the first thing is achieving excellent communication.

Understand what the one thing that you can do to create a better boundary in your life is. Is it able to make some physical space that is just yours? Is it having at least half an hour to yourself at the end of each day? 

There is always one thing that we have in our minds that can help us, reclaiming a bit of time, so you need to understand what the boundary looks like for you.

Communication is your secret weapon

It’s time to enlist some help, once again. Who do you need to talk, to or whose help do you need to create this boundary? Whether you need your partner, a co-worker, or your boss, get clear on who can support you with shifting things to accommodate that new boundary you’re looking to create.

I want you to think about how you can create better boundaries for emails and online communication. This is an extensive conversation, so much so that it is a chapter in Reclaim Your Time Off.

It’s so hard to create better boundaries now that most of our communication happens online. However, it is possible. In this piece, I want to give you one piece of advice that I’ve seen working with members of our collective and clients alike.

Set regular times to check your emails and write a note on your signature or auto-responder to communicate that.

This will be a challenge for you at first, especially if you tend to build up FOMO with regards to your inbox. Stop thinking about emails as messages, and look at them as letters. If you can reframe how you look at an email, you realise you are in charge of the expectations you set.

Schedule your email time today. How often will you check your inbox, how quickly you will reply to your emails? You will be surprised when our people rapidly adapt to what you set for them. This can work for slack messages, DMS on Instagram and anything in between.

You might have to repeat multiple times that you check your emails only twice a day or that it may take you up to 24 hours to get back to an email.

Once people understand and you set those expectations, you will be able to reclaim that freedom.

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