Workplace boundaries are crucial for both your productivity and well-being. Without clear boundaries, the lines between work and personal life can blur, leading to burnout, stress, and decreased performance. In this post, we’ll explore the ten areas where workplace boundaries are most needed and provide actionable tips on how to implement them effectively.
This is the first of a 4-part boundaries series. Refer to Episodes 18-21 for a step-by-step boundaries deep-dive.
The 10 Areas Workplace Boundaries Are Needed Most
1. Work Hours
Setting boundaries around your work hours is fundamental. Clearly define when you are available for work and when you are not. For example, if you need to pick up your kids from daycare, communicate this to your team and ensure they know you’re unavailable after certain hours. This helps prevent work from encroaching on your personal time and maintains a healthy work-life balance.
2. Workload Management
It's important to set limits on the amount of work you take on to prevent burnout. Know your capacity and don’t be afraid to say no when you’re at your limit. Overloading yourself can lead to mistakes, decreased quality, and increased stress. By managing your workload, you ensure that you can deliver high-quality work without compromising your well-being.
3. Communication
Establishing boundaries around communication is key to maintaining focus and reducing stress. Decide on your preferred communication methods and times. For instance, you might choose not to respond to emails after work hours or turn off notifications on your phone to avoid interruptions during personal time. Clear communication about your availability can prevent misunderstandings and ensure that your boundaries are respected.
4. Meetings
Boundaries around meetings are essential for productivity. Limit the number of meetings you schedule and be mindful of their length. Consider whether a meeting is necessary or if the matter could be resolved with a quick email. By managing your meeting schedule, you can free up more time for focused work and reduce the feeling of being constantly overwhelmed.
5. Personal Time
Protecting your personal time during the workday is crucial. Take regular breaks, including a lunch break, to recharge. This might include following the 20-20-20 rule: every 20 minutes, look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds. These small breaks help maintain your energy and focus throughout the day, preventing burnout.
6. Respectful Interaction
Ensure that all interactions in the workplace are respectful. Set clear boundaries to prevent harassment and disrespectful behavior. If you encounter challenging interactions, finding a strategy that works for you is essential. Whether that means directly addressing the issue or finding a way to work around it, maintaining a respectful environment is crucial for your well-being.
7. Project Ownership
Clearly define your role and responsibilities to avoid scope creep and overlapping duties. This not only protects you from taking on too much work but also ensures that the project stays within the agreed-upon terms. By setting boundaries around project ownership, you can prevent burnout and maintain high-quality work.
8. Availability
Boundaries around your availability can prevent spontaneous tasks and interruptions from derailing your productivity. Use your calendar to block out times when you are unavailable, and communicate this to your team. By controlling your availability, you can ensure that your work time is used effectively.
9. Work From Home
When working from home, it’s important to establish clear boundaries around your work hours, availability, and communication protocols. This helps you maintain a healthy work-life balance and ensures that you can be fully present during your personal time.
10. Vacation and Time Off
Ensure that your time off is respected by setting boundaries around your availability during vacations. Prepare your team in advance, set up an out-of-office message, and avoid checking emails unless absolutely necessary. Your vacation time is essential for recharging, and clear boundaries can help you truly disconnect.
Setting workplace boundaries is essential for maintaining a healthy work-life balance, reducing stress, and ensuring long-term productivity. By identifying the key areas where boundaries are needed and implementing them effectively, you can create a work environment that supports your well-being and success.
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What You’ll Learn From This Episode:
The importance of setting boundaries around work hours and workload management.
How to establish communication boundaries to avoid burnout.
Strategies for managing meeting overload and protecting personal time.
Tips for maintaining respectful interactions and project ownership.
How to set boundaries for remote work and ensure your vacation time is respected.
Watch The Full Episode:
Full Episode Transcript:
**EPISODE 19: THE 10 AREAS WORK BOUNDARIES ARE NEEDED MOST
We’re just getting started. Hello, YouTube. Hello, Instagram.
Hello, LinkedIn. We are live. Happy Wednesday, everybody.
It is another episode of Billable Hour Burnout. Today's gonna be a good one. We are kicking off our Boundaries series.
Welcome, everybody. If you're just jumping in, we are live. And I want to know, do you have healthy workplace boundaries? Wait, wait, wait.
Do you have boundaries? Today, I'm telling you about the 10 areas in your job where boundaries are needed most. But first, let me introduce you to the show. Welcome to Billable Hour Burnout.
If you need some helpful tactical advice that actually gives you the career of your dreams without the stress or the overwhelm, you are in the right place. If you want to finally enjoy the life that you spent decades building, you are in the right place. If you're finding yourself here today, it means that you're ready to experience more work-life balance, more ease, more confidence, and you're ready to make it happen without having to quit your job or burn down your life.
My name is Lauren Baptiste, your CPA, regulatory tax compliant person turned life coach, and you're listening to Billable Hour Burnout. See what happens when I try to riff. On the show, I'm sharing simple mindset tactics, strategies, tools specifically catered to the modern woman in accounting, consulting, and law.
You ready? Episode 19. Let's do this. Hi, everybody.
I hope you have been having the best summer. But truly, how are you doing? I'm thinking about you. There is a lot going on right now.
I've been talking to many of you. I'm feeling the energy. The summer is like, even though it's only July 24th, everyone's like the summer is moving so fast.
There's a lot of things happening, a lot of travel, a lot of feeling tired from all that travel, a lot of teams with smaller, smaller resourcing, whether that's because of layoffs, or because everyone's out of office. So I get that there's a lot going on at work right now. And also that there's a lot going on at home.
I can speak to it personally. I have a lot going on. I have good things.
I have challenges. I have all of it. So right now, my mother-in-law's in town.
One of my best friends who lives in Europe, who's been in Europe for five years, she's in town. Maybe she's moving home. So let's see.
Fingers crossed. I have two speaking events this week. I'm coming toward the end of wrapping up that three-month program with the local law firm.
That's been amazing. And I can't believe we did our last masterclass and we're wrapping up. We have a few more sessions to complete the program, but I can't believe how time is flying.
Tomorrow, I have an event with CPA America. So that's going to be exciting. We're talking about prioritizing you.
And there's also backend changes happening. I've hired, I've fired, I've been working it out. And just like everyone else, we're figuring it out one step at a time.
Now, the thing I know to be true is life is always 50-50. There's 50 good, 50% good. There's 50% challenge, but I'm truly grateful for the tools that coaching has given me because when things are in that 50% bad camp, what I used to do was amplify that 50% where it felt like it was 80 or a hundred percent of my life.
And instead I'm really able to take that negative and bring it down and really understand there's such good things. There's so many good things happening that I'm also going to amplify. And then there's going to be the negative things that I'm going to work to reduce.
And that keeps me balanced. And that's the work that I'm doing with my clients every week. There's, you know, in the accounting industry, a lot of promotions have been announced.
It creates feelings. It creates thoughts. It creates what does this mean for me? Do I stay or do I go? So I get it.
If you're kind of feeling excited for your colleagues who got promoted, but also a little weird, miffed, jealous, frustrated about it. I'm your girl. Come talk to me, send me a DM.
Anyway, I'm going off course. Let's talk about a client success story. I do this every episode.
I love sharing what my clients are experiencing, the results that they're having. If you haven't watched last week's episode, episode 18, I highly suggest that you watch it. I interviewed my client, Kristen, a VP wealth management advisor who recently promoted.
So congratulations, Kristen. And while in the interview, she said so many amazing things. One of the things that stood out that I wanted to highlight today is that she said the coaching experience is what helped me make the mindset shift to the promotion.
I don't know that I would have promoted otherwise. I now believe I can hit whatever level I strive to now. And in the future, when she said that I literally got goosebumps because there is something so special that when we believe that anything is possible, it, it just creates a whole different way that we show up.
Our stress is less, our confidence is high. And that's the work that we're doing week over week, over week with my clients. So join me.
All right. So if you haven't had a chance, go back and watch episode 18, but let's talk about today's topic because we are going into boundaries. Now there is a lot of content on boundaries.
You see it on Instagram. And I I'm always a little on the fence of what I see sometimes. Sometimes I think it's a healthy boundary.
Sometimes I think it's not. And so this is where, when we're talking about workplace boundaries can be challenging. You can't just say no all the time, right? We see that in a message that we need to say no more while that's true.
It's also not always realistic. So today when we're talking about boundaries, here's what I want to talk to you about first boundaries. I want you to think about your house.
If you lived in a and you have a fence around this house. Now a boundary is protecting you from the outside world, right? It keeps your dog, for example, protected in your yard. This is not about other people.
So when we talk about boundaries, boundaries are a course of action that you take to take of yourself when a particular set of circumstances arise. It's not about them ever. It's about you.
So when we think of boundaries, I want you to think about it as the protective barrier that fence around your property, around you, that's protecting you. It's not necessarily about keeping them out, but it's keeping you protected. But often we're bad at setting boundaries because we never learned boundaries.
So we want to be really clear as we're thinking about it. Okay. So I have this fence.
It's protecting me. That's all well and good. But I want you to think about boundaries as we take it one step further.
Boundaries aren't mandates for other people to follow. They're not demands. They're not ultimatums, nor are they idle threats.
Now, we're going to go deeper into boundaries as the next few sessions unfold of Billable Hour Burnout. But today what I wanted to do is identify the 10 areas in your job where boundaries are needed. Because if we don't even start there, we're just like, wait, so I just have this fence up.
Now what? So let's think about the areas of our work life that need to be reined in. If you're watching me live, you'll see me. I'm making this like fence gesture the entire time I'm talking because it's true.
We need this protection. And I want you to be thinking about this protection. And I want you to almost visualize that these 10 areas of your job need protecting.
And so I'm going to go through them one by one, and I'm going to give you some scenarios. So let's dive in. Number one, work hours.
You need boundaries around your work hours. You need to clearly define when you're available and when you're not. For example, if you need to pick up your kids from daycare, then your team needs to know that you're unavailable on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursdays after five o'clock.
And so when we think of a boundary, you may tell them, okay, I'll log on later, or maybe not committing to calls that are after that time and saying, hey, can this happen tomorrow? Can this happen at a different time? So we want to think about our work hours as one of those areas that we need to define that we need to work around to have healthy boundaries. Number two, workload management. With that, I mean setting limits on the amount that you work, the amount you can take on in order to prevent burnout and ensure a quality output.
So what does this mean? Workload management. Are you at capacity? Are you over capacity? A lot of times I'm working with women who come to me who are actually over capacity. It's one thing to have a lot of hours that you need to hit, but it's one thing when you're trying to have a life and you're beyond capacity, what happens is quality starts to suffer.
So this is why I say setting limits on the amount of work you take on to prevent burnout and ensure quality. How many clients can you handle at one time? Now for all of us, it usually varies. Maybe it's a few big clients, or for some of us, maybe it's like 20 clients and it's a lot of little clients.
It depends, but you need to know what you can actually do with quality. Once quality starts to be sacrificed, then we can realize, then we start to realize that this isn't working. Then workload management is a problem.
So when we're thinking about this, this is actually an ethics thing, right? Because if you can't provide quality, then that means errors are more likely to exist. That creates more risk and we don't want that. So when we think of workload management, thinking about how many clients can you handle? How many depositions can you do in a day? How many bankrupts can you get through? Only you know what you have capacity for.
So you need to make sure that you're checking in with yourself to understand what you have time for and what you don't. Here's the thing. This is where yes can be a problem.
Oh, can you take this on? Yeah, sure. Can I, can you handle this? Just one more, just one meeting, just one thing, right? And all of a sudden we are over capacity and quality suffers. And even our performance might suffer, right? Because after being overcapacity, capacitated, then we start to suffer and the client suffers and time management starts to suffer and our family starts to suffer.
So workload management is so important that we maintain that boundary. Okay. Number three, communication, establishing preferred communication methods and times, such as for example, not responding to emails or messages outside of work hours.
Maybe for you, communication means telling others when you're available and when you're not, maybe it's means when I'm out of office, here's what I want you to think about or how you want to hear how I'd like you to connect with me. Maybe saying I turn off notification. Words are slipping today, turning off notifications on your phone at night.
So that way, not every email that comes through is a ping on your phone and it gives you some time to relax, but you check your phone once at night before bed, something like that. Right? So organization and communication to me are the most important tenants of working with anybody. I always believed that in myself and I saw a lot of success when I could stay organized and communicate well, communicate and mistake, communicate timely, communicate efficiently.
Those are truly the keys to success. So if we're not communicating well, here's what happens. You're on a team, they give you something, you say, you can do it.
So instead of speaking up about either your availability or how you prefer to be, how you prefer to communicate, then there starts to be issues. Things aren't done on time. Things aren't done the way that you were asked to do them, right? It can get really tricky and this is why communication is key.
How do you want to communicate and connect with others? How do you want them to connect with you? Now, when I was rising up the ladder in the big four world, I was always focused on making those that worked, uh, that I worked for making their life easier. When I did that, I was always successful in promoting and getting where I want to go, because if I make their job easier, then I'm rewarded for that. But there's a balance of communicating when I can work and when I can't.
When I burned out and ended up in an emergency room, what happened is I didn't communicate with them. I would get these emails at night and assume that they needed to be responded to immediately. I assumed who would email me at night unless it was urgent.
That was an assumption I made. Wrong. So what you want to do instead is say something like, when does this need to be done by? That one question can be the difference of you staying up till two in the morning or being able to space out a project throughout the week.
Communication is key. Some of my clients, they use a portal, right, to receive messages. I remember even when I was working in the firms, there are certain portals that are used to send messages.
You know, there are some that will send you a ping on teams and then if they don't hear from you in five minutes, then they'll send you a text message and then they'll send you an email. And instead of now just one response, you have three things you need to respond to. So being really mindful that there is a thing such as over-communication.
So we need to know who we're working with, how they like to work, and how we like to work. So I will leave that there, but I can go into communication for a while. I have a lot of bullets there, so I guess I'll have to come back to it in the future.
But communication is key, key, key, key. Okay, four, meetings. We need to set a boundary around meetings.
We need to set boundaries on the number of meetings, the length of meetings, in order to ensure productivity and the ability to focus on productivity and time to focus on work. I have a client who after working together for a bit, we were realizing she was overbooking herself in a week. She can only see and have meetings with 14 clients per week.
It's the way her schedule is. It's the way it's set up. She can have 14 meetings a week or excuse me, she was doing 14 meetings a week and it had her working nights and weekends.
We found out that the sweet spot, the best number was 11 or 12. Now someone might think, well, two meetings, that's not so bad. We can handle that.
Sure, at the cost of working nights and weekends, which is not what she wanted. She wanted to be more in control. She wanted to be less stressed and overwhelmed.
She wanted to rest more. She wanted to be with her family more. When we changed her schedule to 11 or 12 a week and then we created a mindset that that's okay, then we were able to be more efficient with the time that we did have, make the most of the meetings that you do have and then what it creates is then a more efficient outcome.
It creates, instead of having this persistent burnout, catch up, always behind, have to do work at night to prep for the next day or to catch up from the day before, you set yourself up for success. So that's one instance of how many meetings can you handle in a week. A lot of scheduling tools will actually ask you this.
You can put parameters around how many meetings get on your calendar in any given day or week. Most of us probably don't know that or don't use that, but it is a really powerful way to help stay organized. Now, let's see, what else? Thinking about the time.
How many meetings are scheduled for the sake of meetings? Does it really need 60 minutes? Can it be done in 30 minutes or even more or even easier? Can it be done in an email? We have to be mindful when we're booking 60 minutes. Can we be more thoughtful of how much small talk is filling up the meeting? I saw one of these graphs and it showed that like small talk will take up sometimes like 15 minutes of a one-hour meeting. That is not efficient use of time.
I'm all about building relationships, but that's not efficient. If you think of hourly rate times the person times the number of people in that room, that can be like a thousand dollars or more just in small talk fees. That's not good.
All right, so we're going to start to see a pattern here. Here's another thing I noticed with boundaries in terms of meetings. How many times are you joining three minutes late? How many times are your colleagues joining three minutes late? Then what happens is every meeting runs three minutes over.
Can we start a meeting on time? Can we get through the content and end on time? Be the person in your office that says, hey, we have about five minutes left. Should we wrap up? Or maybe even 10 minutes left. Should we wrap up? Because often it's the wrap-ups that take you into that next time gap.
So you'll start to see a pattern. So you have to know what you're capable of, what you can handle, what you need, but we definitely need boundaries around meetings. Number five, personal time.
Protecting your personal time. What does that look like in the workday? Taking a lunch break, taking maybe a 15-minute break to rest. There's that 20-20-20 rule.
Every 20 minutes look outside or 20 feet away for at least 20 seconds. That's a quick personal time moment. Do you take time for bio breaks or do you just hold it in? We want to make sure that you are protecting the time that you need to recharge, to be efficient, to stay healthy.
I can't tell you how many clients will say, oh, well, I'll eat at two or three or clients that are not eating lunch at all. So we have to really protect ourselves. No one else is going protect us.
We need to have times for us to take care of what we need. For me, I don't block meetings between 12 and one unless it's urgent because I have a block for lunch and my lunch is important to me. And as someone who likes to eat and also prioritizes my health, that's part of my work and I need to take care of myself.
I need to eat. So being really mindful. Another thing, I have a client who was studying for an exam for a certification and she would come into the office early in the morning so that she could study.
But what she noticed in the beginning was that her colleagues would come over and say, hey, you want to get coffee? And in the beginning she was saying yes, but then she realized it wasn't helping her. She realized it wasn't, she wasn't studying. She wasn't doing what she wanted to be doing with that time.
So she had to have the conversation to say, hey, would love to grab coffee after I pass my exam, but for now I'm here to study. So she needed to put up a boundary. Number six, respectful interaction.
Respectful interaction. We need boundaries around not just interaction, but respectful interaction. So enforcing respectful and professional communication to prevent harassment and disrespectful behavior.
Now when we are not our best selves, we may be a little snippier than usual, or maybe we are on the receiving end of someone else's disrespectful or potentially potentially harassing behavior. We need boundaries to be very clear on where we're at. Have you ever worked with a tough boss, client, person? Yeah, we all have.
Now I had a client that I worked with for a good amount of time, and he was a little rough on me. In the beginning, he was definitely pointing out when I would be out of rank, or he would make some lewd comments about my shoes or my outfits, even calling, you know what, I'm not even going to go there because that's not what matters. But I will say for many of us in a law and accounting and consulting, we are in a male-dominated environment, and sometimes comments like this, while they're not meant to be, they're not usually meant as anything, they can be par for the course.
Now as I was struggling with this client, I used to push back because I was like, okay, well if he's going to come at me, I guess I have to come at him. But that actually would make him push even harder. So I decided on another strategy when putting up a boundary.
I decided to go the appreciation route. I started to learn how he wanted to be treated, and as such, I saw his comments shift from lewd or inappropriate to actually kind and almost protective and supportive of me and my growth. And so, believe it or not, went from a rough client scenario to becoming friends.
Now the boundary, it almost is like, okay, so you change because of this person's behavior, but sometimes when we're in scenarios, it's not just about them, right? It's about me. The boundary is for me to protect myself, and this was how I was able to figure out a way to find a win-win. So we're still in good contact.
We still laugh about it. We talked about the things that he said, and it's all good now. And so I always bring this one up because it's a little different than your typical thought of a boundary, because usually if it's an inappropriate comment, we're like, report it to HR.
For some of us, that is a boundary, but for me, that wasn't the right one. For me, I wanted to figure out another way. So just know that not all boundaries are held or handled the same way.
We need to figure out what's right for us and do it in a way that serves as a win-win. And I was really lucky that I didn't have to have an HR sit down in that scenario. I like that I'm able to advocate for myself and figure out my boundaries.
And as I was growing up in the profession of the big four, really had to learn how to handle respectful and disrespectful interactions. Number seven, project ownership. Clearly defining roles to avoid scope creep and overlapping duties.
Now there's a joke in the accounting industry that a senior manager is three things, a senior, a manager, and a senior manager if you're lucky. Now when resources are tight, it's really easy to take on more work than what's actually yours. And what happens here, so that's one scenario where we're doing work that isn't actually at our level, but we have to do it anyway because maybe there's no one that can help us between, you know, you have a staff and you're the senior manager on the project and there's nowhere in between, then you have to be the senior and the manager.
That's just how it goes. And so that can be really challenging. So where we can really define roles or speak up for resources, that's going to help us prevent burnout because then we can say, hey, I will have capacity if I get an extra senior to support me on this project.
And I also want you to think about the idea of project ownership as scope creep in terms of SOWs. How many times are you doing work or have a work SOW proposal signed and all of a sudden you're doing more that's asked of you? Why is that the case? And then you do it once and then they ask again and again and again. So we need to be really careful about when we give a contract that we stay in the terms of the contract.
And it's not just to protect you, it's to protect the client as well. It's a win-win. So we have to think about project ownership because when that scope creep happens, overlapping duties happen, things get a little messy, and it starts to get just, yeah, lose-lose for everybody.
Okay, number eight, availability. Setting boundaries on availability for spontaneous tasks and interruptions. Okay, availability.
So we're talking about boundaries. How do I put a boundary around my availability? Well, you can put this on your calendar. That might be really nice.
If you're not available, like I mentioned earlier, you've got to pick up your kids at daycare on Monday, Tuesdays, or Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, then block your calendar. Show that you're not available after 445 because you've got to go grab your kids. You need to set your own boundaries because others will not do it unless you do it for you.
How often are you just letting your schedule be taken over by other people dropping in meetings? Be mindful of the work that you need to do, the meetings that you can join, and go from there. Now, some of you might say, I don't have control over my schedule. Well, that's part of the problem.
Even if you are busy, even if you are a partner, you still have control. Even if you're a senior manager on the rise and you think, I have to be on all these meetings just because, there are definitely meetings that you don't have to join, and then the ones that you have to, then you show up and make sure that they're the most efficient and drop. So with your availability, communicate it frequently, and you also just have to really hold it to yourself because if you don't hold the boundary around your availability, no one else will.
All right, two more. Number nine, work from home. Establishing rules for remote work, such as specific work hours, availability, and communication protocols.
Now, there's a lot going on when we talk about working from home. We need to be available enough that we can support our team, but we don't have to be available enough that we are always one click away from our computer. If it's after hours and you're actually with your family, but you're the type of person or you are the person currently working from home, then close your computer as if you were going to at your job.
I highly recommend if you're a work from home person to not work in your kitchen. I know we're past the COVID days, so most of us maybe have an office or a dedicated space, but bringing your computer into the kitchen as you're cooking or preparing for something is a lose-lose. It's not great for them because they're not getting your undivided attention.
It's not great for you because it's still draining your energy as you're there. There's a lot of pressure about teams coming back into the office. I get that that's happening, but we also just have to be mindful that communication, again, is key.
We talked about this earlier, making sure that you have parameters around what days you work from home, how you work from home, and how to best stay in touch. Sometimes, because we're home, we feel guilty that we can't even take a bathroom break. We need to think about it as if we were in the office.
Can I take a bathroom break in the office and not be worried that someone's going to ask for where I am? Little things like that, they add up. We've gone through a long list. Number 10, our last one, my favorite, to be honest, vacation and time off.
We need to ensure that our time off is respected and not interrupted by work-related tasks or requests. I invite you go back to episode 16, if you haven't listened to it yet, where I talk through how to unlock your best vacation with my out-of-office strategies. We talk about, for boundaries around vacation, do you have a buffer day before and after? Does your team know that you're going to be out of the office for that period of time? Have you prepared to have coverage to support you before, during, and after? Think about your vacation as sacred.
Even if you have to take a work call, be mindful of when you take that work call. Be mindful of how often you open your emails. For some of us, it's almost like an addiction that we want to check our email just to make sure everything's okay, but I'm really inviting you to step into that greater capacity of the version that you want to be, that I'm told, that you all tell me that you want to be.
We need to start getting comfortable with disconnecting. We need to be okay with closing our computer and having an emergency protocol if you need me, going out of office and having a emergency protocol if you need me. These are the 10 areas where we are experiencing or where we benefit from having boundaries.
We need boundaries around our work hours, workload management, communication, our meetings, our personal time, respectful and disrespectful interactions, project ownership, availability, work from home.
