Boundaries at work.

[00:00:00] You are listening to the Daily Five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we? I am sitting in a hotel recording on my phone and there is an annoying whine in the room that I'm hoping that the app that I use to edit can take out, but I'm not a hundred percent sure if it can, but I am recording because I've committed to doing this every single day, even when I'm not at home.

[00:00:40] Today, the topic of boundaries is on my mind, particularly in the context of work, I've been thinking about this because yesterday I realized that while I have pretty good personal boundaries in my personal life, my professional life might need a little bit of work [00:01:00] in that area, and maybe that is why I have experienced burnout several times in the last few years.

[00:01:10] So what do I mean when I say boundaries? Something I've been thinking about and I even mentioned to someone else, a coworker a few days ago was, you know, don't have your work Slack on your phone. There is nothing happening in Slack or in Microsoft Teams that you need to know about every single minute of every single day on your phone.

[00:01:32] You know, just take it off. When you're at work, you're probably at your computer or near it and you can check it on your computer. If you're in a job that requires you to do site visits or go out, there might be an argument for you having Slack on your phone, but then you should probably turn off those notifications.

[00:01:52] Actually, it doesn't matter what you have on your phone. Most things don't need to have notifications, like seriously. [00:02:00] The other thing that I've been really thinking about is adhering to your own work hours, you know, we've talked about energy management and time management before on this podcast, and I'll link those episodes in the show notes and in that time management,

[00:02:22] in that energy management, we wanna be careful about working only in the times that we've set aside for work and not letting our brains be engaged in work outside of those hours. Because as you know, for energy management, you are gonna have your energy sucked out of you and be put into work instead of the other things you should be focusing on.

[00:02:47] And for time management, I mean, if you're always at work mentally or physically, you know you are gonna burn out. You are gonna burn out so hard. You know, I used to [00:03:00] be at work for long hours, sit in front of my computer for long, long hours because in the moment I could, I had the energy, I had the passion.

[00:03:08] But doing that again and again for a really long time and not allowing myself space for other things in my life is what led to burnout, which meant that for months I was ineffective at my work. For months, I could not do my job really well. So yes, in the moment, those long hours were really great, but in the long term, they actually set me back and made a bigger problem, much worse, you know?

[00:03:39] So we need to have physical, emotional, and mental boundaries when it comes to our work and doing so will make us better at our work in the long run, which is far, far more important than being amazingly perfect right in this [00:04:00] one moment or in this one day. Right? It doesn't matter how great you are on day one or day 30, what matters is how great you were for 365 days, for example, right?

[00:04:18] It doesn't matter for me how great one podcast episode is. It matters how generally great and consistent this whole podcast is for a whole year. The long term, you should always try to keep that in mind. Don't forget the forest while you're looking at the trees, right? Remember the big picture. So that's kind of what I'm thinking about today.

[00:04:45] Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.