It’s no news to you, life is moving faster and faster every day. The new normal is that work starts when you get up (if you’re lucky and no one is calling you from a distant time zone) and ends when you turn out the light for the night. The thing is, it’s not just happening to you, it is now an accepted part of our culture. That acceptance has huge ramifications for how we live our lives. We brag that we work 80 hours/week. Our kids brag about how many activities they’re involved in. No one stops until they drop – LITERALLY!

Technology has helped and hurt us in this regard. We have managed to create flexibility so that we can take our work with us AND attend our kid’s game. As great as this flexibility is, it blurs the boundary between work and home. So we’re never off-duty, either as a parent or an employee. Now I know that parents are never off-duty, but there is a kind of break from the unimportant stuff when you can say, “You guys work it out, I’m at work.”

The other disadvantage to this technologically created flexibility is that it gives us more to feel guilty about. Once you establish a standard that says that you CAN attend the game, then it becomes less acceptable to YOU to miss the game. With the passage of time this guilt eats away at our sense of how well we are coping and we begin to feel over stretched and less optimistic. To maintain our sense of optimism and control, we need to find ways to maintain our illusion of control.

Creating Space for You

I know it seems impossible to create space for you and no doubt there are times when it is. Sometimes life conspires to run us ragged. In my own schedule I am constantly amazed how at times everything is scheduled for the same day. What is really interesting is how I can have an event scheduled for two months out on the 3rd and then everyone is scheduling their events two months out on the 3rd. It’s like there’s energy around that date that draws events to it.

But let’s not use the difficult times to set our standards for behavior. If we can establish good habits for the “normal” times, then it’ll be easier to get back into balance after things have gone haywire. We do this all the time. We overeat during the holidays but get back on the wagon in January. We can do this around our work/life balance too; we just need to decide what’s good for us and what we can do as an exception.

Small Steps

Sometimes little changes can lead to something bigger. Consider trying one of the following:

1. Let it go to VoiceMail. Is it possible that given a little bit of time, some of the problems you solve could be solved in an acceptable fashion by the person calling you? Only you can judge this. What happens when you are already on the phone and they go to VM? If you weren’t immediately available, would they even leave a VM or actually attempt to fix the problem themselves?
2. Create another activity. In my second job as a corporate manager, I worked for a boss who didn’t know how to get a group to consensus AND he wouldn’t make a decision. Meetings originally scheduled to last two hours could go for six hours. At the time, I was teaching a supervision class at a local community college. He knew that I had to leave to teach class. It was a commitment that couldn’t be broken. I was always out of work on time on those days. It made a HUGE difference to my mental health because I knew I was leaving. Although teaching had its own stresses, they were different and gave me a break. I confess I didn’t design this solution, I just got lucky.

So, have you accidentally “discovered” a way to easily protect your personal time?