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February 26th, 2013
Get Out From Under eMail! How I Transformed My Work Centered Life From Stressed To Sane: Step One
One of the dirty little not-so-secrets of being self-employed is that while it’s fun and freeing, at times it’s also incredibly challenging and stressful.
For the first two years of working for myself, I really bought into the idea that working for yourself had to mean working all the time. For me that meant working crazy hours and making lots of sacrifices to feel like I was “earning” my new-found freedom and could make ends meet every month. While making a living is always going to involve some hustle, that hustle doesn’t have to hurt.
Buying into the idea that you have to exhaust yourself to earn your dream life invites the crazy in.
When you’re working tired it’s hard to take the time to set boundaries, to estimate how much time it will take to get projects done (doesn’t everything feel like it will take for-ev-er when you’re worn out?) or to inspire and excite the people around you into action. And without fail, having weak boundaries and being run down always comes with a side order of clients who I’m not a good match for, miscommunication in all parts of my life and general overwhelm.
Crazy, right?
It’s crazy to keep living that way, at least!
For me, it finally clicked that I couldn’t power through to being inspired & happy when I hadn’t taken a weekend off in over a year. And more than that, if I’m grinning & bearing it through most of my days I might as well have kept working at the 9 to 5 marketing job that wasn’t right for me!
This year I’ve finally started to believe that before I can take care of business, I absolutely have to take care of myself.
When I starting believing that I could work in a different way (even if I didn’t know what that looked like yet) and started making decisions that lined up with that possibility, my life started to change.
How I Transformed My Small Business
Centered Life From Stressed To Sane
On Tuesdays for the next five weeks I’m going to share the first steps I’ve taken to get from overwhelmed and stressed to seeing a new way of working that’s positive, productive and doesn’t rule my life. These are practical and simple things that have helped me ramp down my stress and get centered so I can be better at my business and be more fun in my down time.
Sounds pretty good right? So let’s get going!
Step One: Unplug during downtime… with this baby step
Constantly having notifications popping up on your phone at all hours can really make you feel important and in the know. The dark side of constant interruptions is that when you’re “off the clock” they take you out of the moment and disconnect you from the perfectly amazing time that you would have otherwise been having.
That’s play time that you need and earned!
Here’s the thing: no matter how important your work is, when emergencies happen they’re likely few and far between. And in a worst case scenario where one happens, if you empower people to phone you when there’s a Real Emergency (and you’re firm on what that is!) you’ll likely find out about urgent situations faster and be more quick & effective at solving them than if you tried to mash out an action plan on that tiny keyboard.
Still, while it can make all the sense in the world, turning off your email notifications is a scary step to take.
My “baby steps” workaround was finding a mail app that let me set a time window when I would receive notifications. Once I could set notifications to end at 8pm and wake up to find that my house hadn’t burned down, I could start to slowly walk that end time back until I turned notifications off completely.
The result is that I’m less stressed, more present at work and at home, and am much happier. If you’re having trouble finding an app that has this feature, I use iGmail on my iPhone and I love it.
This is the first of five steps in a series that I’ll be sharing on Tuesdays over the next five weeks, so be sure to check back next week!
I agree that this is a really important step! My first year of teaching I was all about notifications and feeling like I should be glued to my phone and replying to e-mails immediately. I thought that availability would make me better at my job. What it really did was exhaust me and actually pull me away from any semblance of meaningful work. And so now I have turned off my notifications. I still let my phone buzz and I know how much action is going on in my inbox but I have been working toward boundaries. This year I plan to tell my students about those boundaries so they know that I won’t be constantly checking my e-mail (especially in the late hours of the night when I’m trying to get shut eye!). I’m also hoping to play with hours of the day to just shut off my phone more or less so I can’t be distracted by other types of notifications (even the social ones) so I can better focus on work time and me time. I think part of what stresses me out the most about how I work right now is just that I do too much multitasking!
I love these series they really help so thank you. I am a freelance graphics designer and sometimes it just gets so hard to organize and manage time right..
I love this post, Kyla! I’ve worked from home in the past a lot while in between jobs, but last August I started doing blog design from home as my “regular job” while I try to grow my online boutique. I’m always trying to find ways to increase productivity, reduce stress, etc.
I actually wrote a post a few weeks ago on “5 Tips for Disconnecting on Days Off”. I swear by all 5 of those tips! Link: http://www.aileenbarker.com/2013/02/working-from-home-5-tips-for-disconnecting-on-days-off/
We’re old fashioned. We don’t have fancy phones that send us email. We just use the desktop computer, and we are in charge of when we check emails; In the morning with coffee, and later in the afternoon to wind up the day. Business is at home, so this works well for us.
You don’t have to be self-employed to know how hard it is to unplug…. I think most of us have the tendency to constantly check our phones (because we might miss out on something!).
Like Ashley, I only have manual check option on my email (I turned notifications off for the pure reason to save battery life ;)).
I do have notifications on Twitter (I use Hootsuite), but that is because @replies are less often than email ;)
I really make a conscious effort at night to put the phone out of reach for a while and focus on time with my husband.
Some ways I stay unplugged when I’m away from the computer:
– I only have manual check option on my email.
– I use Hootsuite and only have a small list of folks I can see (no time wasted!)
– Create folders for my emails so I don’t see the same emails every time I log in, which can be STRESSFUL.
Working from home WITH a toddler makes it much easier to avoid workaholism (“Let’s go for a walk, Gabe!”) but adds its own challenges. Not staying connected 24/7 makes it easier.
I don’t put my work email on my phone and I don’t login when I’m not at work unless I know I have an email with a big project or piece of information that I’m waiting on. Even then, I designate a time to check and then I log off. I find this very easy to do because I work a 8-5 office job. I’m not sure that I’d be able to keep such firm boundaries if I were working for myself!
I also try to remind myself that time I spend working is time that I’m spending away from my family. That helps me to wrap things up and go back to spending time with them!
Looooooove this. I literally *just* wrote yesterday how I couldn’t believe how long I was spending with e-mails and when I finally get the courage to just shut them off, I’m likely checking responses on my phone anyway. Sometimes I don’t mind, but other times it’s just SO overwhelming! My main current downside is that the “working for myself” thing is still on the side, which means I’m still working 4 days a week at another job so I don’t feel like I can just *turn off notifications* at night all the time, because that can often be the ONLY time I have to work on my own projects. That being said, days like today (Saturday!) I need to just close my inbox and let. it. be. Can’t wait to hear more from this series!
Kyla I love this! How insightful and helpful – thanks for sharing!
I sometimes check my email in the evenings, but only if I’m bored. I’ve never come across a true emergency as a freelance writer, so I never feel bad about unplugging and I don’t have a smart phone. If an editor really needs to talk to me at night, he can call, and unless it’s a really bad time, I’ll answer. But that’s pretty rare.
I’ve seen people who are slaves to their cell phones and have sworn it will never be me. I have a tiny pay-as-you-go phone for emergencies and plan to keep it that way.
This is a great post, because it doesn’t just apply to those with an entrepreneurial spirit. I think the advent of smart phones has allowed just about everyone to stay checked in all the time, which takes away from living in the moment. I have started leaving my phone in another room during our evenings with Gavin, particularly during dinner. He deserves our undivided attention and, as you said, the house isn’t going to burn down if we hold off reading the latest Facebook updates.
This is a great idea for a series! I’m always really interested to learn about any aspect of starting/running your own business. One of my favourite things about working a 9-5 admin job is that I can walk out at 5:00 and just leave all of my work at the office. It’s extremely rare for me to think about work outside of those set hours and I certainly don’t check work emails from home.
When I was a reporter, I was passionate about my work but it felt like it never ended because of the crazy assignment hours and because I often kept writing/researching and stressing about articles and layout long after I clocked out of the office.
I imagine I would have a really difficult time finding a balance between work and life if I were to strike out on my own. Kudos to you for finding ways to make that work!
Great advice! I try my best to turn off my computer at 5pm and leave it off. My cell phone is ancient (circa 2007) so it can’t get emails or connect to the internet.
My clients know that if there’s an emergency they can call me after hours–but I have Google Voice set up on my phone so any calls after 5pm or before 8am will allow my clients to leave a message and send me a text letting me know that I have a new business call. Then I can listen to the message and get myself in front of a computer with necessary files open before I call them back!
Oh, and if they call with a non-emergency after hours, they get charged double my hourly rate, so that prevents Sunday-morning phone calls about how to update their personal Facebook profile pic. Sometimes clients think that small-business owners aren’t busy or don’t need weekends or something–it’s important to establish yourself as a real business with real hours! I’ve had to be really clear in my policies, but it’s helped my sanity a lot!
This is great advice! I turned off email notifications a while back, and I’ve been really happy with that decision. The notifications were super distracting and not all that useful anyway. Recently I’ve added another tactic: using the iPhone’s native mail app for my personal email address, while using the Gmail app for my business email address. It sounds silly, but having my business email in a separate space seems to help psychologically, especially when I do want to check my personal email in off hours!
Good for you Kyla – hard thing to do in our plugged in society. I only recently stopped checking work emails after hours, and not by my choice. I had my work emails feed to my phone, but our IT department made some changes to the system so that I (and everyone else at work) now have to get permission. They want to keep track of all staff who want to have work emails available on their phones (which makes no sense because I can log in to my home computer and access work emails that way). My phone isn’t even paid for by work so I said forget it. It’s been the best decision ever made for me. No more stress in the evenings stewing about problems for the next day, and I’m more in the moment with my kids & hubby!
Introvert :) I turned off my email notifications because if my phone lights up I will pick it up immediately, which breaks my focus on whatever I’m working on. Now I only check my email a few times a day when I decide to check it instead of every time an email comes in.
Very glad you’re starting this series. Me and my workaholic tendencies can always use advice. I did turn off email notifications on my phone last year and it was such a stress reliever. Now I only check my phone once after hours, around 9 pm to make sure there aren’t any emergencies and then I’m unplugged for the night.
That sounds like a balanced way to approach your email- it’s tough to find a compromise that you feel comfortable with, so great work Sarah! I’ve love to know if you’re an introvert or an extravert? Maybe part of why being plugged – up to a certain point :) – works for you is that it gets you inspired and energized?