#WFH; What are Your Personal Boundaries?
Personal boundaries can include time, space, emotional, physical, relationship and social areas of your life. Have you ever felt at a loss when you didn’t get done what you wanted to get done and the week is over? Have you put yourself at a disadvantage when you failed to tell someone, “No”? Have you ever felt manipulated or mistreated when someone kept you from doing what you needed to because they knew how to push your buttons? Virtual workers have to learn to set their own boundaries, for a lot of reasons.
Boundaries are less well-defined in the virtual world and this can be challenging for many of us.
It is critical that you learn to set time boundaries because the online world is nonstop. It never turns off. It never takes a day of vacation. It is always on. “I love my devices and services, I love being connected to the global hive mind…but I am more aware of the price we pay: lack of depth, reduced accuracy, lower quality, impatience, selfishness, and mental exhaustion to name but a few”
(Thurston, 2013).
Many of us have felt a disconnection even while being connected. Stress develops from a schedule that has us Many of us have felt a disconnection even while being connected. Stress develops from a schedule that has us constantly connected and is enhanced by our addiction to constant connectivity. We lose time, patience and even our sense of humor because we are always on. We feel obligated to be there even when on vacation. We feel obligated to return the email right away. We feel obligated to respond to the pokes, the messages, the voice mails and all the other things that are coming at us constantly. Time boundaries are about choosing when, and to what, we will respond or not respond.
Perhaps you have had the experience of walking into a restaurant, seeing a gorgeous young couple on a date and witnessing both of them talking on their cell phones, totally engaged and paying no attention to each other. Many of us have developed these outrageous and ridiculous behaviors; we take our email (not our significant other) to bed with us. We sit down in the family room to watch television and wind up posting on a social network all night. If you are feeling like you are always on, never relaxed and guilty because you didn’t respond quickly enough, you might want to set some time boundaries.
Space was a boundary in the physical world that was an absolute. You ate in the dining room, slept in the bedroom and worked in the office. The limits and behaviors coincided. They matched up. But with the breaking down of walls and limits, these have become blurred. More than anything else, space boundaries provide us with a sense of order. We have national boundaries, state boundaries and local boundaries. Personal space boundaries are no different. Even the cubicle had us within our own space, with limits. In the virtual environment, it is important to put some of these boundaries back into place. Set up a workplace for work. And you might want to stop checking email in the smallest room in the house.
#WFH, #RemoteWorkplace, #RemoteWorker, #WorkFromHome, #BobbeGB, #BobbeBaggio, #ThePajamaEffect, #Touchpoints, #Virtual Workplace, #Virtual Worker #PJEffect
