By Caroline M. Cole
You’re working on a report that’s due by the end of the day and the phone rings; it’s a client you haven’t talked to for a while, wanting to discuss an idea for a new campaign. Or, it’s your first day back from vacation and, as you’re trying to reacquaint yourself with projects and their status, coworkers continue to stop by your cubicle, wanting to hear about your adventures. Or, you’re verifying the last few calculations with the hope of actually leaving the office before 9pm, when your assistant walks into your office, needing help with another project. Or, you’re having dinner with friends and your smart phone continues to vibrate. Or, you’re heading out the door to spend the day with family when your supervisor calls, asking you to review the file she just emailed.
None of these interruptions is a problem in and of itself; in fact, these and comparable events offer opportunities to connect to, collaborate with, and support others in ways that promote congeniality and, perhaps, increase karma. Collectively, however, they can leave us feeling frustrated or even depleted, for each time we hit “pause” on the projects and people we are focusing on, we may find ourselves getting further behind or progressively disconnected from that which matters to us.
In Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success, Adam Grant, professor at the Wharton School of Business, explains this phenomenon is particularly common among “selfless givers,” individuals who operate with a high regard for others, often at the expense of themselves, and he offers strategies for helping individuals overcome the so-called “doormat effect” while maintaining a generous spirit. But regardless of where we might fall on Grant’s continuum of reciprocity styles, all of us can benefit from setting boundaries.
To decide where and how boundaries can best serve our purposes, we must first understand where our time goes in concrete ways. For some, a calendar serves this purpose but, in many cases, calendars simply call out anomalies in a schedule: one-time appointments, meetings, deadlines, social events, and so on. Getting less attention are the on-going responsibilities that are loosely grouped under generic blobs of time we might classify as work, school, family, and social life—forums and relationships that have myriad demands of their own.
Consider, for example, the tasks employees might face at work during any given week. In addition to the day-to-day responsibilities, there may be special projects underway, as well as those the employee might initiate or be assigned to in the near future; scheduled appointments; impromptu meetings; and countless ad hoc conversations, phone calls, emails, and texts. For those who may be students, the demands might include attending classes, completing labs, doing researching, participating in study groups or class projects, meeting with faculty, writing papers, and completing assignments—not to mention any extra curricular activities or employment the student may have.
Next, consider what it takes to run a household of any size: shopping for groceries, preparing meals, doing laundry and other housework, paying bills, running errands, coordinating activities for and with children, caring for pets, completing home maintenance projects, and so on.
A social life also demands time to coordinate schedules, make arrangements, host a gathering, or to simply go out. And, if we add in the time we might want for solitary activities—such as reading, working on a hobby, or simply updating our social media profiles—we see that our lives are increasingly packed with a range of commitments clamoring for time and attention.
Calendars, to-do lists, and countless apps are standing by, ready to help us organize life’s demands, but scheduling only the irregularities means that atypical endeavors get our highest priority, Meanwhile, all other people, projects, and goings-on are left to fight it out among themselves for any time that remains; unfortunately, in a society that sees time as money, employment-related responsibilities typically win out. Therefore, we must identify what we need or want to do if we are to find ways to use the time we have to greatest advantage.
Simply listing the demands in our lives, however, is insufficient. We must also distinguish what can help us succeed in each of those efforts. Regardless of whether we are working on a relationship, a project, or an activity, success may be more likely in the presence or absence of particular ingredients—be they people, resources, or surroundings—and while success might be possible in spite of these elements, knowing which factors can move us toward our goals with greater efficiency and which may hinder our efforts can help us decide when and how to engage in a particular endeavor.
If, for instance, portions of a project requires our use of equipment that is shared by multiple individuals, we might address those efforts at times of the day when the equipment is in less demand. If we need someone’s assistance to streamline portions of a project, we might address the parts we can on our own as we’re waiting for an opening in the other person’s schedule. If we need to talk with someone without interruption, we might schedule a meeting on a day or at a time when things are generally quiet, or when we could close doors or turn off our electronic devices with fewer repercussions. And, if we needed to run errands, we might plan to do so when traffic tends to lighter, parking is easier, and stores are less crowded. By identifying external variables and using them to our advantages, we can work with the momentum of success, rather than against it.
We can also use internal variables, such as our personal rhythms of engagement, to respond to demands in the most efficient manner. Consider, for instance, that while we might be able to function for 16+ hours a day, we cannot run at maximum capacity in every area of our life at every waking moment. Our physical, intellectual, psychological, and emotional levels of engagement wax and wane throughout the day, and people will experience these rhythms differently. “Morning people” may feel more energetic at the beginning of the day, and night owls may feel more alert in the evening; others may experience bursts of energy throughout the day. Understanding our personal rhythms can help us pick up, engage with, or work on endeavors at times when we would be most productive and effective; for example, we might take up conventional left-brain activities (that is, quantitative, analytical, and logical endeavors) when we feel most alert, and save right-brained activities for other times.
Knowing who and what demands our time and correlating those demands to optimal windows of opportunities as much as possible can help us be more productive, but to retain our sanity and to promote goodwill in the process, we also need to set and maintain boundaries. The discussion below offers strategies for doing so.
• Communicate our goals, needs, and limits. Though we might wish to be available for every project, person, or opportunity, there will be times we must decline personal involvement if only to minimize compromising our efforts in other forums. Therefore, we must articulate and prioritize the demands in our lives so we can make better decisions about where, when, and how to spend our time in ways that will move us closer to our personal and professional goals. Equally important is that we must convey that information to others so they can be allies in helping us achieve our goals, or at least understand what may be driving unpopular decisions.
People may not always agree with our choices, yet letting them know we can do and what we cannot do helps others know when they can rely on our assistance or contributions, and when they may need to make alternate arrangements.
• Adopt an open-mind policy. Wanting to be available to those in need, many people adopt an “open-door policy,” inviting others to drop in or otherwise make requests on an ad hoc basis. On the surface, this system may seem empowering, and yet 24-hour access seldom means 24-hour receptivity, if only because we are not always in the best frame of mind to listen to or otherwise engage with others. Caught in the middle of a project, trying to take care of other responsibilities, or tending to different needs, we will inevitably see any impromptu conversation, request, or demand as a disruption, meaning that both parties begin the exchange at a disadvantage. Although we cannot foresee every interaction or responsibility that comes our way, we can help others know when we could offer our full attention, and an open-mind policy, rather than an open-door policy, can help in this effort.
An open-mind policy creates specific timeframes or parameters for being not just physically available, but intellectually and emotionally attentive as well. Some people, for instance, have designated drop-in hours or encourage appointments; others are explicit about the times they are or are not available (for example, “You can call me in the office Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, 9am–5pm,” “I check this email account Monday through Friday, 7am–7pm,” or “Friday night is family night, so I’ll be unavailable after 6:00pm”). Though more formal or rigid than some people prefer, establishing such boundaries actually serve all parties. After all, by letting people know when we can be most attentive to their needs, we indicate that they and their concerns are worthy of our attention. We also allow people to organize their schedules and, perhaps, encourage greater preparation than impromptu meetings typically allow. Finally, by carving out times we are available for various projects and people, we make it possible to close our doors, turn off our phones, silent email alerts, or decline visitors to work on other elements or relationships that require our full concentration.
• Give priority to the tasks at hand. Designating time to the people, projects, activities, or responsibilities we need or want to address is a start, but it’s not enough; we must also keep other demands at bay.
Contrary to popular belief, studies show that most people are ineffective multi-taskers. In a National Public Radio interview with Ira Flatow, Clifford Nass, professor of psychology and communication at Stanford University discusses the myth of multi-tasking. Nass acknowledges that our brains are built to receive many stimuli simultaneously, but only if those stimuli are related; unfortunately, we’re often pulled in several different directions on various projects, and that’s where we encounter problems. Nass explains that “the research is almost unanimous… people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. They’re basically terrible at all sorts of cognitive tasks, including multitasking,” Nass asserts, because “people who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted,” and the impact can be substantial.
Monitoring interruptions among office workers, Gloria Mark, professor of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine found that, whereas interruptions for automated tasks that don’t involve much thinking (e.g., signing a form) may result in minimal disengagement, interruptions that require people to shift cognitive resources or surroundings can be detrimental. Requests that ask people to shift topics, shuffle papers, open or close various windows on their computer, move around the office, and so on, Mark explains, make it harder for people to reconstruct where they left off and reorient to their original task. In fact, Mark found that workers needed an average of 25 minutes to recover from interruptions; thus, while individual disruptions may seem insignificant, cumulatively they can eat into our productivity in significant ways.
By establishing tangible or artificial boundaries that allow us to concentrate on one task at a time, we may find ourselves able to achieve far more than we could by spreading our attention half-heartedly across multiple endeavors.
• Be attentive to ooze. Focusing on the task at hand can help us excel but, when we’ve finished with the particular conversation, project, task, job, and so on of the moment, we need to move onto others, without feelings of guilt. In other words, we must be attentive to ooze.
Projects, responsibilities and, at times, relationships will expand to fill the time we give them, and some will demand even more, unless we establish tangible or intangible barriers to prevent them from seeping into other parts of our lives. Unfortunately, in a culture that praises multi-tasking and 24/7 accessibility, we find that boundaries are not only harder to create, but harder to maintain.
Employment is the most common sources of ooze. Never-ending work demands not only occupy people’s time in the office but, progressively, their time away as employees are expected to answer emails and calls at all hours. Further complicating matters is that companies are increasingly organizing retreats, dinners, after-hour drinks, social outings, and other gatherings beyond the office to increase congeniality, inadvertently co-opting time employees might prefer to spend elsewhere or with people other than their coworkers. But work is not the only source of ooze. Family demands can affect employee availability, even during scheduled work hours. Meanwhile, social media makes it possible for family, friends, and associates to check in at every hour of the day, promoting more anxiety for people who may feel compelled to respond immediately to every beep and buzz emitting from their devices.
The ooze has become so great that people, struggling to reclaim their time, are playing games like “phone stack” or instituting “date night,” “family time,” and digital curfews to establish or maintain boundaries in their lives. Yet while such activities can help keep others at bay, we must also recognize the ways we may be creating opportunities for ooze, simply by teaching people how to treat us. For example, by picking up every call or answering every text almost instantaneously, regardless of what we’re doing; by responding to every email message within moments; by becoming one of the first respondents to group messages; by volunteering for every project; and by remaining immediately and endlessly accessible, we teach people to depend us 24/7, even when we may not be the most appropriate individual; we may simply be the first or only person to respond.
As the demands of one forum in our life begin to ooze into other forums, the boundaries become so blurry that we risk loosing sight of our priorities or how to achieve them in the midst of everything screaming for our attention. The result: we busy ourselves with several low-stakes efforts that can seem urgent, but which, in reality, are distracting us from endeavors that are truly important.
We can and should be spectacular in the various forums of our lives. At work, for example, we should show up on time; do what we’ve been asked to do with precision; initiate or volunteer to participate on additional projects; help colleagues meet their demands; and make whatever contributions we can to move people, teams, and the larger company forward. But when we leave the office, we should aim to disconnect from work demands as much as possible. Certainly there may be days we need to go into the office early, stay late, or even go in on the weekend, but these times should be the exception, rather the norm. The same is true for life beyond the office; namely, we should be fully present in the relationships, projects, and social events of the moment, thereby allowing us to turn our attention to other matters when necessary, confident we have not shortchanged anyone or anything in the process.
By establishing boundaries that separate the forums in our lives as much as possible, and by establishing boundaries within those individual arenas, we not only “train” others to see us as more valuable resources, but we also train ourselves to give our best selves to the people and projects that need us.
• Reciprocate. Expecting others to respect our boundaries requires us to respect others’ boundaries. People asking to reschedule, or saying “I’m sorry, I can’t…,” does not give us license to berate, badger, or guilt trip them into doing what we’d like them to do. “No” is, after all, a complete sentence.
It may not be our preference, and it might not be convenient. But if we expect others to be sensitive to or respectful of our boundaries, we must return the favor and help others succeed in the ways they have defined.
* * *
In “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost writes:
Before I built a wall, I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Like Frost, we, too, might wonder about the value of boundaries, especially since they have so often been used to discourage or prohibit access on one hand, or to contain or restrict on another. Certainly boundaries have been and continue to be used in such ways, but they can also be used to promote collective interests. After all, as the often-quoted line of Frost’s poem suggests, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
In the same way that children call out boundaries when playing tag to make the game manageable for all players, or like a guardrail that keeps us safely on the road even when conditions may not be ideal, establishing and maintaining parameters in our own lives can help us be more efficient, more effective, and more successful. Boundaries allow us to interact with and move alongside others, but they also help us move through our own spaces with greater ease. In doing so, we can enhance our performance, maximize our productivity, maintain our sanity and, in the process, be of greatest service to others.
Working toward Areté…
What are your strategies for setting boundaries in ways that serve all? Share your ideas and experiences in the space below.
