Electric fences…or…digital boundaries

I’m sure it’s the farm kid in me but thinking about boundaries around email, social media, online availability always makes me think of electric fences…the good news is digital boundaries don’t have to be as jarring as a zap from a fencer 🙂

Most recently what took me down this path was an online discussion about someone receiving a note that said “I emailed you 3 days ago” (implication, why the heck have you not replied?!?). The poster explained to “us” (the folks in that Twitter thread) that the first email was Friday at 4:47 PM and the follow-up was Monday at 8:15AM. “28 minutes. They emailed me 28 working minutes ago. Bye.”

My initial reaction was 100% supportive of the “tweeter”. As I think about it, I can see angles.

• Should we assume the original emailer is in the same time zone?
• What was the topic and/or what is context…somethings have a greater urgency.
• Maybe the “tweeter” is usually super prompt?
• Does the “tweeter”, the business she represents or the person making the inquiry work a non-typical work week so Sat/Sun are “business days”?

It made me consider how much of our communication etiquette, and at times, offense at lack thereof is tied to our perspective. It’s the old “what is see depends on where you sit”.

For the “tweeter”, who also went on to explain she was barely keeping her head above water, clearly this crossed a boundary – but for the person making the inquiry the delayed response definitely felt like a dismissal.

So much of this is due to:

1. Our expectations about a reasonable response time – I am terrible at email, text, return calls…I can take days, +week…forget completely…my husband is super prompt – he takes your call right then or calls back immediately…which can be a different aggravation for the person who is with him 😛 Needless to say, he’s annoyed by responses that are more than a few hours “late”, it takes me days to get annoyed and often – I’m just happy you remembered to respond!
2. Our own level of overload – the requestor may have been working on a deadline and therefore felt like an immediate response was critical.
3. Our perception of how easy a response is. Often we’ll ask a question and think “oh, come on, it will take 2 minutes to answer” and realistically it’s 20 minutes, which can be hard to come by some days 🌈
4. Lots of other reasons – but really the most important one is most of us have good intentions, as the asker or the doer – we just ALL feel like we have too much to do.

We can lessen our aggravation by putting ourselves in others shoes, and by clearly communicating our boundaries.

Here are some things to try:

• Set up an autoresponder that “answers” messages when you’re off hours. “Thanks for your note, I’ll be back in the office on Monday at 8 AM“.
• Communicate your hours / availability on the contact form on your website “Drop me a note, I’m available M-F, 8-6 Pacific time”
• When you send a note that is beyond “normal” business hours – set it to send Sunday night, or Monday AM – or put in the subject and/or body “sending while I’m thinking of this, it can wait until Monday (or 9 AM, or whatever) – this is really important if you’re in a position of authority. Bosses frequently do their catch-up at night or on the weekends, employees don’t know the urgency so assume it’s a “hop on this now” (they don’t have any idea you just replied to 200 emails).
• If you have a business where someone could have an urgent need, provide an alternate contact such as a way to text you; or consider having an off-hours service that can filter incoming messages for truly urgent
• Send a “received, I’ll reply by X” note. I worked with a creative services team that all did this – I LOVED it! I didn’t have to put energy into mentally tracking the progress of the message.
• Do the best you can to not send your request outside of biz hours, or if you do – and need a fast turn, acknowledge that “sorry to send end of day Friday, I’m in a bind, if you can respond on Monday AM I’d appreciate it”.

What are some of the ways you tend your digital fences and maintain good relationships?

You’re not old, or out of shape – you have a crummy workspace!

Finding that at day of working at your desk is making your back hurt, your hands cramp, your neck sore? Or – not noticing any of that but can’t concentrate, your co-worker, spouse, pet, child is more annoying than usual?

All of these and many other things are quite likely tied to poor ergonomics.

First – here’s my personal evidence. My whole life I’ve been a “power-through it” kind of person. I’ve taken great pride in my grit, my toughness – it’s part of my identity. I could drive longer than other people. I could work all day as a waitress without eating or peeing. I could stay-out late, get up early. In the corporate world I could attend back to back meetings all day, eat lunch at my desk and work on deliverables until 8 PM.

Aside from the obvious issues such as poor diet, limited stress management and non-existent work and personal relationships – the other thing that started to happen was my body started to complain.

Initially it was lack of focus, irritability, poor memory. Then it became back pain / hand cramps. So, we all know what to do then right? Of course! Throw in the the odd stretch and a few ibuprofen and keep rolling; totally going to start taking better care of myself as soon as this project, document, meeting, etc… is done.

Well – my body eventually made that decision for me. I developed such severe back spasms that I had to lie down to lead meetings. I could only sit at my desk for about 1/2 a day. My boss let me work from home many afternoons. I couldn’t drive my car!!

It took 4 months of chiropractic care and physical therapy to get me “functional” again. I have permanent soft-tissue damage in my back. 13 years later I do yoga everyday, consciously exercise, manage my ergonomics and make purchasing decisions (ie car) based on back comfort. I have to physically “train” for flights longer than a few hours…good grief! LOL.

From a recent Wall Street Journal article: “Left unchecked, ergonomic issues can lead to permanent pain, disability and an inability to work at all. Still, at the beginning of the pandemic, employers were understandably more concerned with pressing crises—keeping their businesses afloat, keeping workers safe from the virus—than the threat of aches and pains.“

It would have never crossed my mind that poor ergonomics could lead to permanent muscular issues. There were not as many articles 15 years ago, or I was ignoring them because I was invincible?

So – here’s what I wish I’d paid attention to from the beginning.

• Maintain your body’s general health. Stretching, yoga, light weights, general exercise. MAKE TIME. 15 – 30 minutes a day now is way less intrusive than hours of recovery.
• Plan in breaks. Take lunch – not at your desk 😛 – and preferably with other humans.
• If your company offers it, have an ergonomic assessment. If your company doesn’t, do one yourself.
• A few tips on that from the WSJ article:
  • Survey your equipment: Ditch broken task chairs and backless stools. Avoid wooden kitchen chairs if you can. Aim for a desk that’s 30 to 36 inches deep and at least 3 feet wide.
  • Get moving: Every hour, spend at least a couple minutes stretching or walking around.
  • Watch your posture: Don’t round your back into the dangerous Office Turtle position that Mr. McEnaney warns against. Relax your shoulders and keep your elbows to your side.
  • Sit tall: Make sure your eyes are level with the top of your computer screen and you’re an arms length away from the monitor. If you need to raise yourself up, stack pillows on your chair and use a box or binders to fashion a makeshift footrest.
• Here are some things I’ve done.
  • 2 monitors, a docking station and a wireless/keyboard mouse. Monitors/docking station I got at BestBuy. Mouse/keyboard I have bought from Amazon, and also BestBuy. I really like this Logitech set, but each to their own.
  • Proper “work” chair – Staples.com, they deliver!
  • Electric standing desk – I got mine at Office Depot, lots of choices though.

And every morning I start with my stretching/yoga etc… this has the added benefit of being my anti-anxiety medication too 🙂 I’ve been using this song list so long that when the first one comes on my body / brain go “ah….” 😛

I know, it’s so hard to find the time / money to make these changes. If you can’t do them all, do a few. Get a proper mouse/keyboard for your laptop, or an external monitor…or both 😉 Get up and stretch after reading this post. Plan to do your next call as a “walking” call, grab your earbuds. Put all those old books/magazines in a paper grocery bag, fold it over, viola! foot rest.

It’s worth it! I truly thought I had developed memory/cognitive issues. Once I started fixing my back I got about 40% smarter – I was amazed at how much being in pain had impacted my brain. You’ll make up the time you “waste” by being healthier, more focused and more efficient.

Okay, close your computer, go walk around the block…are you still here? GO OUTSIDE.. 😀 ❤

The strength to ask for, or accept help…

I try to keep these posts short, easily skimmable. This one is a little longer, bear with me 🙂

The other day I was lucky enough to join a group of friends for a Zoom happy hour / fundraiser. The cause was breast cancer. This group is passionate about breast cancer because a dear friend has been battling stage 4 metastatic breast cancer for 9 years. (Here’s a good article to learn more about this chronic breast cancer).

At one point the discussion turned to how do you stay positive in the face of this incurable, aggressive disease. Her answers highlighted her internal strength and optimism and drive. The other thing that emerged was the importance of accepting help, and learning to ask for help. (note, I’m writing this post from a feminine strength perspective because the “protagonists” are women and as a woman it’s kind of a “write what you know” – but I believe all of this applies to men too – maybe even more as men are not really taught to “ask for help”)

Our friend is super independent and competent. She’s an engineer, she’s a single homeowner, she’s a marathoner. I’m so thankful she has equally strong friends who are not going to take no for an answer. She shared how lucky she is to have a strong support group, and her best friend who insisted on attending all doctors appointments, chemo sessions, CAT scans and continues to do so to this day…managing MBC is pretty much a full time job. She also spoke of a few other friends who just stepped up. There was no waiting to be asked, and there was no accepting any polite refusals.

The conversation made me think of my step-Mom’s experience with breast cancer and my Mom’s experience with bile duct cancer. Both of my “matriarchs” were strong, competent, intelligent women. Neither asked for help, and it was tough to get them to accept help – they were not used to needing help. It was foreign to ask, uncomfortable to accept and pushed them out of their familiar “caregiver, leader, problem solver” roles.

My step-Mom moved – by herself – from France to the US, and then to Canada as a 22 year old. She married a French man and had 2 children. They spent over a year living on a catamaran and sailing the world – with idyllic scenes like my step-brothers learning to dive by retrieving the dishes she’d throw overboard for them to “rinse” but she would also recount huddling under the galley’s dining table clutching her tiny sons as they rode out a hurricane. As they hit the Halifax harbor and she refused to take her children back to sea she was faced with a Peter-panish, dissatisfied husband who had numerous affairs leading her to strike out on her own.

The woman I met several years down the road was still very independent and now had the confidence and surety that comes with age and experiences. She was no nonsense when necessary and fun loving and mischievous pretty much any other time.

She was diagnosed with cancer in 1997 and tackled it much like she did everything else – with intelligence, intensity and humor. She had a strong support group, a big family and many friends. And she would never ask for help. Sometimes we would forget to push it on her because she was so strong and didn’t seem to need it.

The best illustration I have of this is after her cancer has returned in 2002. During a doctor’s appointment where she, my Dad and step-brother learned the doctor believed things were on the right track and they’d know more in a couple of months.

After the appointment Dad, my step-brother and my step-mom chatted about what to do that afternoon. Should they go for lunch or take care of chores, meet up later. They all agreed to go their separate ways. Dad and step-brother headed off feeling a sense of relief – optimistic even. My step-mom, who in her typical independent way had insisted that she was fine, not hungry for lunch and would see them later, went off feeling much differently. She was processing what she’d heard in the appointment – that the doctor thought she probably only had a couple of months left. Luckily later that day the miscommunication was uncovered and clarified.

That’s a perfect example of not being able to ask for help (if you think you’ve just been told you have 2 months to live, you need support, you are not fine) and of not forcing help (anyone going through a psychic trauma – critical illness, bankruptcy, divorce, death is NOT okay and is NOT absorbing and processing normally).

My Momma’s story has many similarities. She learned that she had bile duct cancer in July of 2017. We lost her that October; bile duct cancer is super aggressive and fast moving. We barely had time to absorb the diagnosis before we had to arrange for hospice and put Mom’s estate together. I lived in California, Mom lived in rural Colorado, on the NM border. If I’d listened to her words I wouldn’t have had any idea how much help she needed.

My Momma was fiercely independent and physically so strong. She could carry a 50 pound hay bale in each hand, use one to hold down the barbwire fence, the other to push back hungry cows and climb over the fence by scissoring her legs over one at a time. She was SO bright, and interested – in everything! You know the People magazine most of us have in the bathroom? Her bathroom reading was a laminated chart covering the 4 primary laws of physics — or something like that, I never fully grasped it, I was reading People …😂

When I first got to her house she was so tiny. And overwhelmed. She didn’t understand half of what she’d been told by the doctors. This powerful, bright person – who owned a copy of Winnie the Pooh written in Latin?!? – was doing the best she could and had asked no one for help. She was used to being able to manage anything. I don’t think it even crossed her mind that she wasn’t fully grasping all of this.

Bouncing back to our friend who is currently fighting MBC, she says that yes, this is true – you don’t “hear” the updates. She’ll come from an oncologist appointment and her friend that goes with her will say “okay he said you need to do X, Y and Z” and “the patient” will say “he did? I didn’t hear any of that”.

I definitely saw the same stuff happen with my Mom. And I did it too. When my Mom passed a dear friend said “I’m on my way” and if she’d asked I would have said “no, I’m fine, really, it may actually be harder if you’re here”. Thankfully she didn’t ask and wouldn’t have accepted a refusal. I was in a fog. I didn’t even realize.

These snippets are to illustrate that often those of us who seem the least in need of help are in fact totally overwhelmed, and don’t even realize that we need help.

So – if one of the humans you love is currently caught in personal hurricane – insist that they accept some help. If you are the one saying “nope, I’m good” – no you’re not.

I know you may feel like you can’t admit you need help because what’s getting you through this is grit, but you are strong enough to ask for help. Yes, it takes courage to be vulnerable and to ask/accept but you’re a badass! You can totally admit you’re scared or overwhelmed, or tired. I know it feels like if you say that out loud you won’t have the strength to get back up, but I promise, you will. And the people you’ve asked for help will give you a hand up.

As a side note – not all of us have personal contacts we can ask for help. Here are a few other options.

• Support groups
• Facebook (not only for cat videos) (and other social media)
• Church – even if you’re an atheist
• Therapy – group or individual

Sending love and light your way – you can do this! ❤ 🌻

Too busy carrying water to dig a well…

I am not sure where my Dad got that line, when I Google it I don’t find many references but seems to be tied to a proverb of some sort. The gist of it is if you’re always hauling water you don’t have time to do anything else.

Today I was chatting with a friend. She’s doing the work of 3 people (literally, was a team of 3, 2 left). She’s buried, and the company is not acting inclined to reward this hard work. She’s applied for an open position that would give her a promotion and 4 weeks later they’re “still interviewing”… I’ve strongly encouraged her to look elsewhere and she’s inclined to…just as soon as she has time…

This is such a common dilemma in our lives – particularly in our work lives, and it seems to me like it’s worse for women who are often taking care of their work life, their children and general household stuff.

The only way to change this is to decide that you want a different pattern and to carve out time for it. I hate to write this because I know that when you’re doing all you can to run back and forth with those full buckets and not spill any someone saying “you have to do more” is totally overwhelming.

You don’t have to do more. You can actually do less.

Keeping with the water metaphor, if you carried 3/4 of the water and spent the leftover time digging a well it will take a little while, but you will eventually have a well. Or is there something that you are doing that someone else could do for a little while? For example, can you make a deal with someone else in the village that if they carry water for a week, you’ll let them use the well? Said another way – can your partner look after the kids, grocery shopping, cooking, laundry…something, anything….once a day while you update your resume, LinkedIn profile and start resurrecting your network? Live by yourself? Instead of working 55 hours a week, work 45, or 50. Use that “found” time to dig a well. I know that you can’t finish your work if you don’t do the 55/week – but realistically, you’re probably not finishing it anyway, and no one is noticing…or if they do, then they probably really need you and can’t afford to fire you. (Granted, this is when the overflowing work has been for months, not a couple of weeks to get over a hump). If you’re an hourly employee and you need the 55/hours to pay your bills…can you cancel your streaming for a few months so you can cut your hours? I know none of these things are easy to do. They’re all really hard.

The pay off is – make this investment now and in a few months/years (time to dig the well and get water varies for us all based on a ton of variables) it WILL be worth it. Every person who has dug a well will tell you “it was so hard, I had no idea how I’d find the time, the strength, the money… but it has completely changed my life”.

Now – after this whole post of “if your life is not what you need, change it” – I will add a caveat.

Another path is to adapt to the life you have. Going back to my friend, she has another choice other than leaving her current job.

She can start prioritizing the work on her plate and when the priority list adds up to the hours she’s able/willing to work – 45ish is fair to help cover a gap for awhile, some folks have the stamina/personal circumstances to do 50 – anything that won’t fit in that “bucket” doesn’t get done. Period. Something I’ve observed in a +20 year corporate career is not everyone kills themselves to work 60 hour weeks, at least not their whole career. The ones who don’t are efficient, prioritize and SET BOUNDARIES. Companies are not conscious of what your breaking point is. As a matter of fact our bosses and team members trust that we are effectively managing our own personal capacity to NOT break. They’re counting on us to carry the water we signed up for, and if we are carrying more than we can reasonably do long term, it will cause a drought when we collapse and not only can’t carry the extra, but stop carrying our “normal” load too.

So – take a minute and figure out if you’re carrying too much water and if so, come up with a plan to either carve out time to dig a well or set boundaries.

If you need help keeping yourself on track, make a promise to yourself in the comments…I’ll check in and see how it’s going ❤ 🌈