Boundaries in a world of instant messaging

I thought about messaging someone late last night with something I was very excited about related to our professional pursuits. I paused for a moment, wondering if that person would be awake, or if I would be disturbing them. And that got me thinking about all of the times through my career I have been disrupted by an impromptu Teams message, text or email during my personal time and how difficult it made work/life balance. Having worked in a hybrid environment with outcome driven deadlines rather than the usual 9 to 5, my hours were often flexible meaning that I may or may not be working at 10:00 pm, but I also may or may not be working at 10:00 am, so if someone had a question, they were likely to shoot me a quick message to see if I was online and available. Seemed reasonable, but it also made it impossible for anyone to really know if I was actually available and it made it difficult for me to differentiate between work and me time. During those times, I also felt obligated to respond, even if I was busy with my family. I worked in a leadership position for continuous improvement, which often meant troubleshooting and providing support after hours for customized solutions we had developed for the organization.

In response to this blurred work/life boundary, I started putting everything in my Outlook calendar so it would flow through to my Teams status availability as a first step. In addition, I would manually set my Teams availability if I happened to sit down at my computer for a few minutes but didn't want to be disturbed, or if I wanted to signal to other teams that I was available should they need me. Finally, I made very good use of the Focus mode on my iPhone so my family time was not continually interrupted. But still, myself and my team would wake up to Teams and Outlook messages sent at un-Godly hours that would create a sense of urgency to log in and solve the problem for other teams that had also been working flexible hours. However, it was a VERY rare occasion that any of those messages couldn't have waited until 8:30 am when one of us was ready to log in for the day.

Despite our best efforts to manage our own notifications, we were still feeling like we were never really able to disconnect or have strong boundaries between our work and home lives, but no one was willing to give up the flexible time to go back to the office 9 to 5. Our office was predominately young families with young children at home, so the flexible time had become a necessity for balancing the demands of working full time while raising children in a two income household.

Our teams together with leadership agreed on certain ground rules. We established priorities for communication:

• Email: lowest priority. Email was best used for sending follow up documents you didn't want lost in the bowels of Teams chats and files or messages that were non-urgent and could be responded to whenever the recipient got around to it. Essentially, if an answer wasn't required in the next 48 hours, email was sufficient.

• Teams: medium priority. Responses within 48 hours would be expected unless marked as Important or included an @mention which of course, would require a quicker response.

• Text: urgent. Text was very rarely used between teams, but rather utilized between team members of the same team for urgent help. If assistance was required from another team, it was up to the leader of that team to reach out to the leader of the team providing assistance to assign someone if required.

In addition to establishing priority of communication, we also agreed that messages should be held during certain hours. Understanding that people are working at varied hours and it becomes difficult to remember send a message at a later time, we encouraged staff members to utilize the options in both Teams and Outlook (linked) to schedule a message to be sent at a later time.

Of course this doesn't solve all of the work/life balance concerns of a hybrid or remote working environment, but it definitely alleviates some of the smaller issues and reduces notification fatigue. It also gave both parties control over their schedules... on one hand, it is of course the responsibility of each individual to protect their own time, shut down their work and step away for some much needed rest, but it is also the responsibility of the sender to be respectful of their coworkers personal time. This is especially true when technology provides several options for respecting those boundaries.

I didn't send the enthusiastic message to my colleague last night, but I also didn't schedule it. I like check lists, so I added it to my paper to-do list instead. Do what works for you, but make sure you're protecting your personal time.