The importance of setting boundaries for productivity in the age of constant connectivity

As I’m writing this post on Sunday evening at 9pm, I just finished catching up with some small tasks for next week. It’s my second week as a “businessowner” and manager. In all honesty, I’m already feeling the pressure of not only being responsible for my own (client) work, it’s also carrying the responsibilty of the Coffee Digital team.

Setting boundaries to focus more

The main challenge I encounter is that it’s really hard to set boundaries. In this day and age, it can be easy to get caught up in the constant flow of emails, messages, and notifications. According to my Slack Analytics overview, I’m in the top three of the most messages within our whole company (40+ employees). That’s something I’m definitely not proud of. This means less time to focus on clientwork and performing tasks to grow the company.

For some, setting boundaries comes easy. For those who struggle with people-pleasing, it can feel like an insurmountable task.

As my tasks and responbilities in within the company are growing and ‘me’ time is less self-evident, I’m searching for ways to get a bit grip back of my working hours. I’ll share a couple of ‘improvents’ I made in the last weeks.

Stop Slacking

One thing I try to do, is creating an extra “boundery” to contact me. Within our company, we use Slack as a primary communication tool. In Slack I’ll add a status ‘Focus’ when it’s time to really get something done. This not only gives me the motivation to focus on that perticular task, but adds an extra step for my colleagues to send me a message or call me.

Hybrid working has its advantages

During the Pandemic, everyone had to work from home. All the newspapers where full of the disadvantages of working from home. Ok. I don’t have kids that are running around, but still I didn’t mind working from home. On the contrary, I wasn’t destracted anymore by small things around the office. My productivity wend up instead of down. So, if I know I have to do focused work, I just work from home. Tip: Google just added a new feature in Google Calendar. You can now add the location to your day-to-day calendar, so your colleagues know your not working from the office today.

I’ll report back

There are 100 more boundaries-hacks you can apply to optimize your workweek. But I also learned not to change everything at once, so I’ll report back if I see a real difference in my productivity. If I apply other ‘improvents’ to my workweek in the future, I’ll add them to this post.

See you at the next one! 👋🏻

This post is part of my #100daystoOffload challenge. Post 3/100.