Feeling burned out isn’t just for founders who work absurdly long hours. It can also happen to other company leaders and managers whose attention and energy get pulled in every direction. Here are six tips to protect and defend your boundaries without causing offense or confusion without causing confusion.
Identify the intruders
Identify people, tasks, and contexts that traditionally try to intrude on your schedule
- Create strategies to keep them at bay
- Social media and gaming apps lure us away from more high-worth activities, so create strategies to prevent that
Stop Being Overly Helpful
Your time and energy are finite resources, and every time you give yours away to someone else, those resources are no longer available to you for your own work.
- Show your colleagues the courtesy of letting them process and resolve their own problems, and let yourself focus on your own.
Draw a firm line between work and personal life activities
Commit to leaving work behind at a set time and then embrace personal activities such as family time, exercise, pursuing hobbies and creative rest.
- Communicate your “on and off” hours to your team members and employees so they know this is a priority for you.
Chunk your daily time into context-driven slots
Set aside one hour for processing all your email, then don’t look at your email again until the next email chunk.
- Make sure your schedule and chunks of time are visible to your team, so they know when they can and cannot intrude.
Reclaiming your time and defeating burnout
Carving out protected time that’s as distraction-free as possible is necessary for getting that kind of focused, attention-heavy work done.
Get into the habit of previewing your schedule
Preview your day’s schedule the night before or first thing in the morning to give yourself a better sense of what’s ahead
Check in with your team regularly with better meetings
Regularly scheduled meetings are the most effective way to keep up with every team member’s workload and process, but they also help avoid smaller disruptions during the remainder of work time.
