Setting boundaries
One of my goals for 2021 was to schedule (and stick to) having roughly one week a month with no/minimal meetings. I’m again setting this intention for 2022. These monthly reprieves (if I can make it happen) both enables time for PTO (because sometimes scheduling it when needed is too hard) and to enable time for thinking and writing – which are actually some of the most important parts of my job.
Taking time away from meetings – from the daily grind – is modeling productive behavior for others and contributing to changing cultural norms. I recognize blocking off many weeks a year is hard-to-impossible for people with weekly clinical practices. Instead, I encourage everyone to ask themselves what norms they could challenge. It’s clear an organization benefits from overwork, but everyone is hurt by burnout.
In late 2021 I was still meditating on boundaries: how to know where to set them, and with whom. Academia and medicine are examples of “greedy” professions where more hours of work are expected and rewarded, and there is always something else to do or patients in need.
As a colleague said so eloquently, “the pandemic really highlighted how the systems we live and work in (school, childcare, health care) have inherent biases and obstacles for certain populations. Employees have twisted themselves into pretzels to try and fit into existing systems and that's not working anymore.”
Boundary setting, such as prioritizing family and self; to take vacation and to make time for loved ones, or to prioritize gaining skills we need to achieve long-term goals, is almost counter-cultural and a skill to be practiced. This was a good article on setting boundaries on generosity and service.
Yet I want to acknowledge that setting boundaries and enforcing them is substantial and tiring labor, in and of itself. We need rules or heuristics for yourself of what to say no to and why. We may need a “no committee”. To accept new opportunities we need to find other things to stop. We need to acknowledge the tradeoffs, which may include sleep, exercise, or time with family. Frankly, we may not feel we have the job safety to set boundaries, and instead we may need to search for new jobs, potentially in new sectors - this too is time consuming and tiring.
As another wise colleague said, “we need to stop patching the holes for the system in order to give the system an incentive to change.” If we stop doing work for free, occasionally someone realizes the work is sufficiently important to pay for the labor.