Creating work-life boundaries is a key to preventing burnout, but how on earth do you keep your work and home separate in the middle of pandemic?

Are you struggling to keep it all together? We are going to be living with the impact of COVID-19 in one form or another for the foreseeable future. Coping with anxiety, psychological distress caused by COVID-19 is significant challenge.  

And then there are the more practical challenges, like trying to keep work and home separate. Are you working out of your bedroom, or your living room, or side by side with your children at the kitchen table?

Do you want to have a sustainable private practice?  One way of preventing burnout is through having clear distinctions between home and work, not always easy.  Although some seepage from one to the other is normal, you want to avoid a clear take over where you are not at your best in either space. Staying in control of your work-life balance and protecting your time, energy and values is an ongoing process. Whether you are working from   home, going into work or using a hybrid model, here are my top 9 strategies to help you create and defend strong workplace boundaries. 

1. Identify what matters most to you
2. Identify recurring stressors
3. Clarify role expectations
4. Set realistic expectations of your time and energy
5. Make Imposter Syndrome your best business buddy
6. Own your diary
7. Have clear work policies and procedures
8. Establish a work-life transition process
9. The five allies you need to defend your boundaries

1. Identify what matters most to you
Finding the confidence to set and protect your boundaries is difficult, particularly for early career psychologists.  Certain boundaries in a work setting are clear.  These include legal, professional and some ethical boundaries. Other boundaries are more flexible and negotiable. Where you choose to place these boundaries is influenced by your needs, beliefs, resources, and intentions.
 
After you consider legal and ethical requirements that come with being a psychologist, it’s time to consider your values. As a professional you have many decisions, including who you work with, what you charge, when you work, what modality you use, what resources you buy, how you want to work.  ​

• Are you clear about your values? 
• Does how you currently work reflect what is important to you?
• Where are you placing the value of self-care? Maybe when you say you don't have enough time to look after yourself, it is covering up the real reasons you aren't engaging in self-care. 

Incongruence between your values and those of your workplace will create a situation where your boundaries feel under constant attack. 
 
If you’re not clear about your boundaries, spending time reflecting on your value is an important step.

​2. Identify recurring stressors
Make time for regular reflection and bring awareness to your current work situation.
 
How do you feel when you: 

• Sit down to write a report or a doctor's letter?
• Receive a notification or a ping on your phone? 
• Open emails?
• Have a client cancel at the last minute?
• Are seeing a client with an unfamiliar presentation?
• Have someone tell you they can’t afford your fees?
• Receive a phone call, email or text from a particular client or particular organization?
• Take a client history and realise their risk factor is high?

 
The above are some potential areas of recurring stressors that contribute to workplace burnout AND opportunities or threats to your boundaries.

Identifying recurring stressors are a good place to stop and think about your boundaries.

• What have I set up to deal with this situation? 
• What matters to me in this situation?
• Is this situation violating a boundary I have in place but aren’t protecting?
• How can I stop this situation sucking up my time and energy?  

3. Clarify role expectations
It’s clear from my conversations with other psychologists that role expectations vary, often dramatically, between workplaces.  And the lines between being a subcontractor or employee can be blurred.  One clinician stated that at "My other clinic I feel confused by, in terms of am I an employee or a contractor. It feels quite grey, rather than black and white, which leaves me at times confused as to accountability and responsibility and who is managing the risk". 

Legal advice on whether you are an employee or a subcontractor is recommended.  And then this helps the next step, of fully clarifying your contract details.  Read your contract and position description. Write down your interpretation of what the contract means. Check your interpretation with your employers understanding. Work through ambiguities.  If you are employed, check it with any relevant legislation including workspace, and think about asking a lawyer to check through it as well.  
 
Areas to ensure you understand include who is responsible for areas such as

• Covering when reception is at break
• Compulsory attendance at meetings
• Following up when clients don’t attend sessions
• Talking with clients outside of sessions
• Marketing
• Sending doctor’s letter and reports
• Rescheduling client appointments

 
Outside of work, do people in your life understand what you do?

• Do the people in your life understand what your role as a psychologist means? 
• Do they know what is your work and non-work time?  For me, working from home without a formalised work day means I sometimes need to protect my work time from friends and family who want to catch up during the week.
• And if you are a solo psychologist, do you need to do all the roles? Can you outsource anything? Accounts? Marketing? Virtual administration? If not now, when? 

 
4. Set realistic expectations of your time and energy
Remember that drive to impress when starting out? The need to do more to quiet you inner Imposter Syndrome?  It’s not sustainable. Do you want to be working these hours, taking on these responsibilities in two years’ time? If you don’t, stop setting up unsustainable expectations. 
​
Whilst flexible boundaries are important in helping you adjust to the changing demands that are part of managing the ebb and flow that is work-life balance, there comes a tipping point. This occurs when your mindful decision to do more, to bring work home, to talk about work at home, becomes less of a choice and more of a reflection of a loss of control about keeping work-life separate. This seepage is an indicator that you are slipping towards overwhelm and burnout. 
​
Think about your current individual situation. 

• What are your personal resources, demands, physical and mental health? 
• How much do you have to give to work? How many clients do you want to see? How many do you need to see for financial reasons? Do the fees you charge allow this happen?
• Do a client audit.  How does that fit with the number of clients you ideally want to see?
• How long does a letter or report take you to write?
• How do you know when you finish a report? 
• How much unpaid time do you spend between sessions talking to clients, contacting clients or planning client sessions?

Looking at the above, where can you set boundaries around unpaid for time and unproductive tasks?  
 
The digital time black hole
The time spent reading, organising and responding to emails is estimated to take hours each day; it is a big productivity drain. If you want to check for yourself you can track your time and see for yourself how much time and energy you take with this task.  
 
Digital time drains include engaging in tasks such as responding to emails / phones and texts from your workplace and/or clients outside of hours.

• Do you have a separate work and home number/phone?
• Do you have emails on your phone?
• What is your system for managing emails?
• Do you respond to calls/texts/emails from clients? Or do you wait for session time?

 
If the digital world is overwhelming, a regular digital declutter can help. 

5. Make Imposter Syndrome your best business buddy 
The imposter is that pesky voice in your head that tells you that you aren’t good enough, you don’t know enough, you can’t do that, even when there is plenty of evidence to the contrary
 
When that pesky voice is driving you to do more, to be more, this has a direct impact on your time and energy levels.  It can mean putting your hand up to do things that aren’t your responsibility to prove something to yourself and others.  It can mean putting in extra hours so you know just what to say and do in the next session with a particular client.  
 
You can flip this though.  When Imposter Syndrome is reframed to be the quiet voice of questioning and curiosity it can be your best business buddy. 
 
Sit down and listen to it and let it guide you into doing a reality check. 

• What are your areas of stress and overwhelm. 
• What are your strengths, talents?
• What are your obstacles, are they real? 
• What do you know and not know?
• What do you need? Is it actually more knowledge and experience, or is it a tightening of boundaries? 

 
As a bonus, the Imposter Syndrome can help test out the congruence of your workplace setting as well as strengthen your interpersonal boundaries.  Identifying people you trust can result in lowering your boundaries in some areas and lifting them in others. 

• If you are fearful of being found out as a fraud, who do you trust to talk to? 
• Who can sit with your vulnerabilities without judgement? 
• How do you feel in your workplace when you make a mistake or don’t know something?  

 
6. Own your diary
You are a limited resource. No matter how hard you work, there is still only 24 hours in a day. 
 
Use your diary as a tool.  Mark in your self-care time, and any other time that is important to you. Mark in your holidays. Don't let admin fill your diary out until the end of the year without breaks. Do that client audit and work out how many client hours you are doing a week. Is this sustainable? During times of crisis many psychologists report a need to ‘step up’ and do more for their community. Whilst this may be sustainable in the short term, it can create a chronic lack of control over work-life imbalance leading into burnout.

• What gets in the way of your personal diary?
• How do you manage client reschedules and cancellations?
• How do you manage client/workplace requests for appointments outside your agreed upon hours?
• What happens when you are ill, or your child has as a special event on? 

8. Establish a work-life transition process
Having a mindful routine that helps delineate work from home is helpful in letting your mind know that work is done for the day. Being able to rest from work demands is essential in maintaining control of your work-life balance. Some strategies include:

• Environmental Cues – having a separate space for work and home activities. Turning off the computer when you are finished. Changing work phones. Turning on your voice mail. Changing your clothes or earrings. Playing a particular song or piece of music. 
• Routine. Going for a walk/gym/dance/yoga etc at the end of your work day. Making a special snack or a cup of tea. Journaling about your day, writing down your to do list for tomorrow, or a list of what you have accomplished today. If you are transitioning physically between home and work perhaps there’s some music, or a podcast you regularly listen to. Perhaps you touch a special bush or tree in your front garden where you leave all your concerns before opening your front door. Maybe it’s taking three deep breaths before leaving your car. Choose something meaningful and easy for you. 
• Mantras. The variations on this are endless. For example, using a Mantra such as “today I have made a difference when I could in the lives of my clients. Now it is time for me to rest and entrust them to their own resources”. Or, “today I did my best to embody a caring, compassionate psychologist. Now it’s time to rest so tomorrow my best most caring compassionate psychologist self can show up again”
• Visualisation. This may involve visualising putting all the concerns and worries you are left with at the end of the day in a velvet lined box, locking it up and putting it in a safe for you to get out when you next work. 

 
Do you have a favourite transition strategy?

CONCLUSION
Maintaining control of your work-life boundaries to avoid slipping into overwhelm and burnout takes effort, so that you can create either a sustainable career as an employee or a sustainable private practice.  The encroaching of work demands into your personal time, energy and what you hold important ranges from very clear breaching through activities such as workplace bullying and exploitation, to more insidious and subtle practices.  Without a preventative and proactive self-care approach you are placing yourself at risk.  Creating clear boundaries is one of the key self-care strategies.  Use the questions and reflections in this article as a guide to help you prevent occupational burnout and improve work-life harmony.
 
OVER TO YOU
I’d love to hear your experience of work boundaries and burnout.  Is it the digital time suck, the weight of Imposter Syndrome, or the exhaustion of trying to work out the essential from the non essential administration tasks?  Or something else?

Get the support you need to build a sustainable private practice.  Check how well you are coping and sign up for the Private Practice Sustainability Community mailing list for fierce self-care, connection and collaboration opportunities. 

Chat soon

Kim