Healthy Work/Life Balance
How to keep your work and life separate over the holidays.
Today’s topic is having a holiday that’s really … a holiday. The quick and dirty tip is to put barriers between you and everyone who might want your time.
It’s that special time again, when we’re getting to that family-oriented time of year, when we all have lots of quality time together. Although, depending on your family, to make it quality, that time might be spent on separate continents.
No matter what, you want good life balance over the holidays, otherwise your brain will explode from the stress of it all. Some people spend their playtime obsessing about how they should be working, then they spend their work time fantasizing that they’d rather be playing. This is not a recipe for happiness. Don’t do it. When you’re working, work. When you’re playing, play.
Pulling this off takes a gatekeeper. See, these days, all our little connected mobile devices were supposed to give us work/life balance. They do, but only if we use them the right way. If we let them become little interruption factories, they make life a Living Heck. When you’re at work, you want to keep your home life at bay. When you’re at home, you want to keep your work life at bay. Here’s how.
Build Email Barriers With Autoresponders
Pretty much every email service on the planet now offers vacation autoresponders. These let you automatically respond with a message saying, “I’m not taking email at the moment. Try me later.” On holiday, set your autoresponder to say, “I’m away right now and won’t respond to your email. Resend it when I return.”
But what if you’re expecting something truly important that you’re willing to be interrupted for? For that, there’s a nifty little service called AwayFind.com. In your autoresponder, you say, “I’m away. If you still need to reach me, go to AwayFind.com/stever and you can use the form on that page to reach me.” They can visit that page and from there, and Awayfind can forward that email to your mobile phone or to another email account. By making it just a little harder to reach you, 99% of the people emailing will immediately self-select out.
Build Phone Barriers With Voicemail
Another big source of interruptions is phone calls.
Set your phone to always forward to voicemail. Change your outgoing message to say, “I’m away on holiday. Leave a message and I’ll call you back when I return.” Simple. If you absolutely need to give people a way to reach you, say you’ll check voicemail once a day, “if possible.” By saying, “if possible,” people won’t quite know if you’ll call back or not. They’ll leave a message in vain hope that you’ll be there, and then you can use your own judgment to decide whether to actually return their call.
And when you’re having fun with friends? Keep the cell phone turned off, in your pocket. Humans survived quite nicely without cell phones for a hundred thousand years. You don’t need to be reachable 24/7, even if you do have small children, a neurotic spouse, and a baby-sitter you suspect is really a pod person. Check your voicemail at predefined times, just like you check your email only at predefined times.
Repeat that 10 times: only at predefined times. Only at predefined times. Only at predefined times. I recommend 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. The rest of the time, play.
Build Physical Barriers
The biggest temptation won’t come from voice or email. It will come from your laptop. Yes, that beautiful creation of crystal, titanium, and plastic. It calls you. It beckons. It says, “you can catch up on work, even while you’re at home.” Resist the siren song! Your technology is supposed to improve your life, not take it over.
Leave your laptop at home. Yes, that’s right, leave it at home. If you absolutely need to access something on it while you’re gone, use remote-control software. Every computer platform in existence has it, now. You’ll have to beg your Aunt Dolores to use her computer, which will subject you to eternal ridicule and contempt from your family, so chances are you’ll resist all temptation and spend time with your loved ones instead.
This All Works in Reverse
If, by the way, you come from a family where holidays are best spent 8,000 miles apart, you can do all these things in reverse! Put the autoresponder and AwayFind on your home email. Bring your laptop with you and find reasons to spend hours on it, with impressive-looking spreadsheets open on it. And forward your home phone to voicemail. If you don’t have voicemail, use a service like K7.net, which is free voicemail, though you will have to pay forwarding charges.
Either way, you’ll have a much happier holiday season if you let yourself truly spend time with the people you love. This episode’s transcript has links to all the tools that will help build the walls that will let you frolic joyfully with your four-year-old nephew. And no one at work ever needs to find out.
This is Stever Robbins. Email questions to getitdone@quickanddirtytips.comcreate new email or leave voicemail at 866-WRK-LESS.
Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!
RESOURCES:
- K7 – Free voicemail.
- AwayFind autoresponder that still lets emergencies through
- GotoMyPC remote-control software
- RealVNC cross-platform remote-control software
Image courtesy of Shutterstock
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
