If this sounds like you, know that you’re not alone—and it’s not a failure of time management or prioritization. Based on your career success, if that were the problem, you’d have solved it already.  These are skills you demonstrate daily.

The real issue is about setting and reinforcing healthy boundaries through introspection, clear communication, and practical habits.

Let’s explore why boundaries are essential, why you struggle with maintaining them, and the steps you can take to finally reclaim your evenings and restore balance in your life.

Laying the Foundation: Setting Limits and Communicating Boundaries

Before you can address deeper causes, it’s crucial to establish a solid foundation. This means setting clear limits, defining what work-life balance looks like for you, and communicating these boundaries with work and family.

As I was getting multiple shift responsibilities in my career, it was really hard to regularly get home on time. People I was responsible for were in the plant 24 hours a day. If someone asked for my time, even as I was heading out the door, I felt the most respectful choice was to give them my time and full attention, resulting being late for dinner again. When there were issues, which was most days, I was logging in afterwards to follow up and check in with the other shifts. Besides irritating my husband because he was "second" to all those people at work, I was getting exhausted. So needed to set a clear expectation, an escalation plan and communicate to my team. You may not need an escalation plan, so I'll focus on the other two.

Define Your Vision of Work-Life Balance

Take a moment to reflect on what an ideal week looks like for you. Be specific as to who you want to be, not just on what you want to do. Visualize your evenings, weekends, and time spent with loved ones.

Anchor this into your Christian identity, by focusing on what the Bible says about how is it that God wants you prioritize your time and leverage your gifts. For example, "put [your] religion into practice by caring for [your] own family and so repaying [your] parents and grandparents, for this is pleasing to God" (1 Timothy 5: 3-8). A few details to consider.

• What time do you want to finish work each day?
• How often do you want to be home for dinner?
• What family events, hobbies, or self-care activities do you want to prioritize?
  

Example Vision:

“I am someone who puts my faith into practice with my family by showing how important they are. I want to finish work by 6 PM on weekdays, so I can have dinner with my family and spend quality time with my spouse. I want to attend my child’s soccer games every Saturday morning and reserve Friday evenings for date nights.”

RELATED:  Embracing Your Christian Identity Transforms Stress & Work-Life Harmony 

Set Clear Limits and Boundaries

Now that you have a vision, set clear, actionable boundaries to protect it. These limits help you know when to stop work and shift focus to your personal life. There are multiple types of boundaries and methods of defining boundaries. Here are a few examples:

• Time-Based:
  • “I shut down my work computer by 6 PM every weekday.”
  • “No work emails after 8 PM.”
• Event-Based:
  • “I attend my child’s events unless there’s a true emergency.”
  • “Date nights are non-negotiable on Fridays.”
• Behavioral-Based:
  • "I do a brain dump before I close the computer to clear my mind and thoughts for the evening."
  • "If a work-thought crosses my mind, I jot it on a notepad I keep in my pocket instead of getting the phone."
• Location-Based:
  • "No checking notifications or responding to the phone while in the dining room or kitchen."
  • "I leave my laptop in the trunk of the car and only bring it in if there's an emergency."

You'll want to keep these very clear. Some of these may be hard to implement all at onc, we'll get to that a bit later on how to break these down further so you can successfully make progress.

RELATED:  Work-Life Harmony: Setting Effective Boundaries with Narrow Gates

Communicate with Work and Family

Boundaries are only effective if you communicate them clearly to those around you and get their agreement to support them. If you need to agree on what constitutes an emergency and how they can get hold of you in the event one occurs, include that in the discussion.

Inform Your Workplace

• To Your Boss:
  “I’m committed to leaving by 6 PM each day. This helps me stay refreshed and perform at my best. I’m happy to handle urgent requests before that time.”
• To Your Team:
  “I’m available until 6 PM. After that, I focus on family time. If you need something urgent, please let me know before 5 PM.”

Involve Your Family

• Share Your Boundaries:
  “I’m working on shutting down by 6 PM. Please help me stick to this by reminding me if I lose track of time.”
• Ask for Their Support:
  “If I’m still working after dinner, gently remind me why I set this goal.”

Key Point: Building a clear vision, setting limits, and communicating them establishes a foundation for success. Now let’s explore what might be undermining these efforts.

Why You Struggle with Work-Life Boundaries

Even with clear limits, you might find yourself slipping back into old habits. When you are stressed and exhausted, some limiting or negative thoughts may come to the surface as part of your coping mechanism. These may not be part of your normal behaviors at work (but they could be). Understanding the underlying thought patterns that drive these behaviors is essential to reclaiming time.

Recognize the Thought Patterns and Stressors

These thought patterns aren’t just mental—they affect your emotions, decisions, actions and overall well-being. To help identify them, try stress journaling, recall a recent stressful situation that lead to work being brought home or missing a family event and ask yourself:

• “How do I feel when I overcommit?”
• “What emotions come up when I think about setting boundaries?”
• "What actions did I take as a result of these thoughts?"
• "How does these emotions, thoughts or behaviors impact my ability to maintain boundaries?"

Cognitive distortions are thought patterns that lead to ineffective behaviors or bring up emotions that may not match the situation. Here are some common patterns that you might find sabotaging your boundaries:

1. Perfectionism / Micro-Managing:
   • Thought: “If I don’t do this perfectly, I’ll fail.”
   • Stressors: High-stakes projects, fear of mistakes.
   • Emotions: Anxiety, fear of failure.
2. People-Pleasing:
   • Thought: “If I say no, they’ll think I’m unreliable.”
   • Stressors: Requests from colleagues, client demands.
   • Emotions: Guilt, fear of rejection.
3. Catastrophizing:
   • Thought: “If I miss this deadline, everything will fall apart.”
   • Stressors: Tight deadlines, unexpected tasks.
   • Emotions: Panic, overwhelm.
4. Imposter Syndrome:
   • Thought: “I’m not good enough; I need to prove myself.”
   • Stressors: New roles, high expectations.
   • Emotions: Self-doubt, procrastination.
5. Over-Achieving:
   • Thought: “If I don’t take on extra work, I won’t be valued compared to others.”
   • Stressors: Desire for recognition, fear of being overlooked.
   • Emotions: Pressure, fear of insignificance.

Insight: Recognizing these patterns and their emotional impact is the first step to change.

RELATED:  Embracing Your Christian Identity Transforms Stress & Work-Life Harmony 

Maintaining & Stengthening Boundaries

Step 1: Daily Reflection and Journaling

Self-reflection reinforces your motivation for boundaries. It also helps you continuously improve and learn how to protect your personal time, as you relieve stress and imporve work-life harmony. Use these sample journaling prompts as part of stress journaling to clarify your thoughts:

• What are my core values (family, health, faith)? 
• Which recurring work habits conflict with these values?
• What emotions arise when I violate my boundaries?

Invite God into your journaling with faith-based reflection. Sometimes, old habits or beliefs that once served you well prevent you from doing what is the right next step in this moment. Pray for the strength to set boundaries, the courage to trust Him, and the wisdom to recognize what truly matters.

Faith-Based Reflection:

“I am a child of God, and my loved ones deserve my presence.”

Step 2: Reinforce Boundaries

There are many ways to reinforce boundaries. Today I'm covering behavioral geo-fencing, which is a method I have not addressed elsewhere. This can also be used to shore up tiny habits to help you consistently take small steps toward your vision of work-life harmony. Sometimes simple statements like the examples earlier are hard because they are black and white, significantly different than your current behavior and hard to ease into from your current state of regularly working late into the evening.

What is Behavioral Geo-Fencing?
It’s a method of setting physical or digital “fences” that cue specific behaviors to prevent boundary violations. This doesn't have to be digital like how your phone app is set up to give you a reminder when you enter a specific location. Just a clear definition of what behaviors can happen at what time and/or in what location. It helps reinforce boundaries, particularly as you change behavior, by giving an alternative to all or nothing thinking. They are infinitely flexible and can be designed based on your unique behavior patterns and possible danger zones. When thinking about where to try out your first behavioral geo-fence, ask yourself, “Where am I most likely to do the behavior I’d like to do less of?” Or, “Where can I more easily begin to restrict the behavior?” As an example:

Establish Tech-Free Zones to Increase Quality Time:

• Identity Statement: “I am someone who puts my faith into practice with my family by showing how important they are.”
• Desired Behavior: Leave work devices in a designated “work zone” until after dinner. It gets rid of distractions during dinner.
• Behavioral Geo-Fence: No work devices in dining room and kitchen from 6:30p-7:30p (or when my spouse and kids leave the area if it goes later).

As you are getting started, it's not as difficult to stick to versus if you said your first action was "lock" the devices away for the whole evening. If you hear your phone blowing up, you can go check on it at 7:35p and not "violate" your boundary.

As you get good with this initial tiny habit, you can slowly exclude other areas in the house or add a longer window of time before you can check in. This allows you to practice creating more time as you build confidence amd momentum toward your goals. It gives you a chance to "train" your colleagues to your boundaries, so there are fewer people reaching out afterhours. Also, when you've had a pattern of disappointing loved ones, when they know what you are doing and what this small step is, you are able to start to rebuild their trust as they see you be successful with spending more quality time with them.

Step 3: Continue to Communicate and Reinforce Boundaries

Clear Communication with Colleagues

Regularly inform your team of your availability and limits (particularly after you slip and cross your own boundary). Periodically seek feedback to ensure this is working and where else you may need to make adjustments to ensure you continue to sustain your performance.

Respect Others and Build Reciprocity
Honor your colleagues’ boundaries to encourage them to respect yours. Build relationships so they have some understanding of why you set your schedule this way.

Clarify Job Responsibilities:

Be clear about your role and limits, so you don't take on more than necessary. Know when to delegate or seek other support from the team.

Accountability Partners

Share your boundaries with a trusted friend or colleague at work who can help you stay accountable.

Step 4: Prepare for Challenges and Confrontation

The Provisional “Yes” Strategy

When urgent tasks arise, ask clarifying questions:

• “Can this wait until tomorrow?”
• “What part of this is truly urgent?”

Practice Saying “No”

Set limits and recognize what is not your responsibility:
“I can’t take this on now, but I can help you find a solution or the right resource.”

Recognize What Is “Enough”

Let go of perfection and don't dwell on "finishing touches." Be aware of what is truly value added versus goldplating or busy-work:
“This doesn’t need to be perfect or over-the-top; it needs to be done.”

Confirm & Align Priorities

Someone else's urgent may not be yours. Reassess priorities:
“You asked me to finish X today. Should I prioritize this new task over X?”

RELATED: How to Maintain Boundaries 

Reclaim Your Evenings, Restore Your Relationships

Boundaries protect what matters most—your faith, family, and well-being. With introspection, clear communication, and tiny habits, you can achieve work-life harmony. I know these tactics work as they were key to me figuring out how to successfully support my team across all shifts while ensuring I regularly made more time at home. It took a lot of trial and error to figure out what worked as I didn't have a mentor or coach guiding me. Hopefully the way I've laid this out makes it much simpler and easier for you to make progress toward having more personal time. 

I pray...

I hope this inspires you to take another first step toward freedom from exhaustion and reclaim your time from work. Protecting your time at home for family and personal interests — is a step toward work-life balance. Spending more time with loved ones and hobbies revitalizes you and improves stress resilience. 

How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity! (Psalm 133:1 NIV)

When you get pushed to make a hard decision related to your boundaries, give yourself permission to surrender the worry to Him  and trust in God's grace. You will relieve stress and improve work-life harmony.

Putting It Into Action: Build Tiny Habits for Big Change

Ready to make small changes to better support your boundaries? Or to start journaling to help strengthen and improve boundaries? 

Download my free guide to building tiny faith-driven habits that relieve stress and imporve work-life balance. With these simple tools, you can start today to transform your workday by building small, meaningful boundaries that honor your body, mind, and spirit. Go from striving to thriving and flourishing as God intends for you!

Let’s explore why traditional time management isn't enough, how negative thoughts about yourself may be adding unnecessary work to your day, and how introspection and journaling can help you create lasting, faith-driven productivity changes to reduce stress and improve work-life balance.

To reach your level of career success, you’ve already mastered the art of planning, prioritizing, and scheduling. You deliver on time. You meet deadlines. Your time management strategies work! But if you’re still exhausted, overwhelmed, and missing out on life, the issue isn’t the clock. There's no magic hack that creates more time.

The real challenge lies in how your inner perfectionist, people-pleaser, pessimist, or imposter might be adding unnecessary work to your day. Negative thoughts or beliefs like these strongly impact stress coping behaviors. The more stressed you are, the more these behaviors may occur. For example, these distortions can lead you to:

1. Over-prepare for meetings or projects or take extra time to tweak a deliverable from great to perfect.
2. Say “yes” when you should set boundaries because you are already overscheduled and loaded with tasks.
3. Expect the worst, causing you to be overly cautious with an overbuilt risk management plan and double-checking unnecessarily.
4. Second-guess yourself due to imposter syndrome, leading to redoing tasks unnecessarily, procrastination or excessive consultation.

There are many more unhelpful stress coping tactics, these are just a few to show you how your thoughts and beliefs can be eating your precious time and causing inefficiency. Addressing these limiting beliefs by seeing yourself as God views you, will help you reduce stress and improve work-life harmony.

What You Need: A Lean & Faith-Based Approach to Productivity

In the world of manufacturing, continuous improvement—often known as “lean”—is a strategy to make processes smoother, more efficient, and less wasteful. For example you can uncover productivity opportunities hidden in your day-to-day work by refining routines, eliminating outdated practices, or simplifying reports or work processes. Reviewing your routines can reveal small changes that make a big difference. Small tweaks to your daily work habits can free up valuable time without sacrificing effectiveness. Eliminating non-value added habits, steps, interactions cuts out the waste, leaning out your work habits & processes.

This same approach can be applied to your daily work habits through faith-driven introspection and targeted journaling.

RELATED:  Addressing Common Gaps in Time Management & Prioritization 

Introspection and Journaling: Tools for Identifying Productivity Traps

Journaling offers a way to slow down, reflect, and align your work habits with your values. By identifying where cognitive distortions are adding stress and strain, you can reclaim valuable time and peace of mind.

Here’s how journaling can help with common productivity pitfalls:

1. Over-Preparation: Letting Go of Perfectionism

You spend excessive time preparing for meetings or projects, driven by a fear of making mistakes or not meeting impossible standards. You can lose time tweaking and revising emails, reports or presentations trying to make it perfect. This can lead to late nights, fatigue, and less time for family.

But he said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. - 2 Corinthians 12:9a (NIV)

Journaling Prompts to Reflect and Adjust:

• What am I afraid will happen if I don’t prepare perfectly?
• What would “good enough” preparation look like for this task? What am I doing that is not-value added for the stakeholder?
• Have I experienced situations where I over-prepared but it didn’t change the outcome? What did I learn?
• What’s the worst realistic consequence if I prepared less—and how could I handle it with grace?

Related Work Habit: Use time blocks or timers to prevent losing excessive time.

Remember that God’s grace covers you, even when your work isn’t flawless. Trust that your worth is in Him, not in your productivity.

RELATED:  Embracing Your Christian Identity Transforms Stress & Work-Life Harmony 

2. People-Pleasing: Setting Healthy Boundaries

You say “yes” to every request, fearing that saying “no” will disappoint others or damage your reputation. This adds tasks to your plate and increases stress. People-pleasing may also cause you to withhold information or delay in delivering "bad news" because it might reflect poorly on you. This reduces the amount of time you and the team have to address the issue. This increases pressure and tension. You may also begin to resent or feel irritable with the people you keep saying "yes" to when you really want to say "no."

Let your 'Yes' be simply 'Yes,' and your 'No' be simply 'No'; anything beyond this comes from the evil one. - Matthew 5:37 (AMPC)

Journaling Prompts to Reflect and Adjust:

• Why am I saying “yes” to this task when I don't have the time or energy for it? Is it out of obligation, fear, or genuine desire?
• What happens to my energy, focus, and family time when I take on too much?
• When you do the task instead of the person truly responsible, what impact does this have to them and their growth?
• How would setting a boundary in this situation honor my values and priorities?
• What’s a gracious way I can decline this request or propose an alternative?

Related Work Habit: When asked for a favor, try saying "maybe" and ask for a moment to check. It gives you time to compose yourself or think of an alternative. In time you can feel comfortable saying "no."

Saying “no” with integrity and kindness allows you to honor God’s design for balance in your life.

RELATED: Setting Effective Boundaries with Narrow Gates

3. Pessimist: Overcoming Fear of Failure By Creating Trust

You expect the worst, so are overly cautious. Extra time is spent double-checking or micromanaging tasks to better control the results. With so many worries of what can go wrong, extra tasks and complexity can be added to avoid or mitigate risks. Maybe you are taking on more work for yourself instead of delegating because "no one can do it as well." Any of these behaviors drains your energy and steals time from rest and relationships. 

Lean on, trust in, and be confident in the Lord with all your heart and mind and do not rely on your own insight or understanding. - Proverbs 3:5 (AMPC)

Journaling Prompts to Reflect and Adjust:

• What’s the specific fear behind my need to double-check or micromanage this task?
• How does this extra oversight benefit others? Yourself? Is it value added to your customer?
• Has my fear of failure ever come true—and if it did, how did I recover?
• What evidence do I have that my team or I are competent and trustworthy in this task?
• How can I release control and trust God with the outcome of this task?

Related Work Habit: Eliminate non-value added checks or simplify a process by removing redundancy.

Releasing the need for control and trusting God’s plan can ease your anxiety and help you work more efficiently.

4. Imposter Syndrome: Overcoming Self-Doubt

You feel like you’re not smart enough or good enough, causing you to second-guess decisions, seek excessive validation, overly analyze or study, or procrastinate out of fear of being found out as a fraud. This lack of confidence magnifies perception of stress and inhibits your ability to be creative, strategic or efficient.

For I can do everything through Christ, who gives me strength. - Philippians 4:13 (NLT)

Journaling Prompts to Reflect and Adjust:

• What evidence do I have that I am capable and competent in my role?
• When was the last time I succeeded despite my self-doubt?
• What would I tell a friend who felt like they weren’t good enough?
• Who am I seeking approval from, and why do I feel I need it?
• What is one small step I can take today, even if I don’t feel 100% ready?

Related Work Habit: Keep momentos around you to remind you of your prior success. Instead of seeking multiple points of validation, schedule time with just one trusted mentor or expert to help you get a better perspective.

Your abilities come from God, and He equips you for the tasks He calls you to. Trust that His strength is working through you.

Putting It into Practice: Continuous Improvement for Your Daily Work

Start Small:

• Choose one area of stress coping behavior to focus on—whether it’s over-preparation, people-pleasing, catastrophizing,  imposter syndrome, or something else.
• Reflect on the journaling prompts. What is one thought you can pray on and ask God for honesty & strength to transform? What is one behavior (super small) that you can change through faith-driven tiny habits.

• Spend 5-10 minutes at the end of your day journaling about how you handled that area. What went well? Based on your work habits, routines or other behaviors, what could you do differently? 

Pray and Trust:

• Invite God into your productivity journey. Sometimes, old habits or beliefs that once served you well become unnecessary burdens. Pray for the strength to set boundaries, the courage to trust Him, and the wisdom to recognize what truly matters.

Grace Over Grind: A Faith-Driven Path to Work-Life Balance

You don’t need more time—you need to use the time you have differently. By addressing the root causes of overwork, perfectionism, pessimism and self-doubt, you can free yourself from endless striving and embrace God’s grace.

Remember:

• Your worth is not in your work.
• God’s grace is sufficient.
• Small changes lead to lasting transformation.

As a Christian professional, your worth isn't tied to productivity or perfection. God’s grace offers you the freedom to step back, reassess, and work smarter—not harder.

When you trust God’s purpose and let go of unnecessary burdens, you open the door to:

• More time for family and faith.
• More energy to pursue personal interests.
• More peace of mind knowing you’re on the right path.

I pray...

I hope this inspires you to take your first step toward freedom and reclaim your time from work. Improving your productivity is more than just a work strategy—it’s a step toward living a fulfilling life aligned with your faith, family, and purpose. Give yourself permission to let go and trust in God's grace. May you find the balance and peace you seek. Let’s embrace grace over grind—together. You will relieve stress and improve work-life harmony.

Putting It Into Action: Build Tiny Habits for Big Change

Ready to make small changes in schedule for regular prayer & journaling to uncover hidden productivity opportunities? Or to make changes to work habits to reduce stress?

Download my free guide to building tiny faith-driven habits that promote stress relief and work-life balance. With these simple tools, you can start today to transform your workday by building small, meaningful routines that honor your body, mind, and spirit. Go from striving to thriving and flourishing as God intends for you!

Colossians 3:23-24 calls us to work wholeheartedly, as if for the Lord, rather than through fragmented attention and constant distraction. When we shift from multitasking to focused, single-minded work, we invite God’s presence into each moment, allowing Him to guide us and granting us peace. Let’s look at some of the common beliefs that keep us tied to multitasking, and explore how to capture, challenge, and change them to align more closely with God’s truth.

Recognize any of these beliefs?

1. "I have too much on my plate; multitasking is the only way to keep up."

Capture: Recognize when this belief arises, often in moments of overwhelm.

Challenge: Ask yourself, “Is multitasking truly helping me complete my tasks well, or is it just making me feel busy? How do you react when you believe that multi-tasking is the only way to keep up? Do you feel more stressed or calmer? Are there alternate ways to I address when I have too much on my plate?"

Change: Start small by focusing on single-tasking during certain blocks of time. For example, dedicate 30 minutes to one priority task without interruptions. Not only will you finish tasks faster, but you’ll also find the quality of your work improves. By committing fully to one task, you can leave behind the feeling of being spread too thin.

2. "Multitasking makes me feel productive and in control."

Capture: Notice when the urge to multitask arises and reflect on whether it’s actually making you feel more productive or just more stressed. 

Challenge: Remind yourself that productivity isn’t about busyness; it’s about impact. Ask, “What would happen if I focused on completing one task at a time? How do I know that I am more productive? Am I really in control?”

Change: Shift your focus to single-tasking by setting a clear intention for each task, completing it fully before moving on to the next. Research shows that single-tasking not only enhances the quality of work but also provides a sense of accomplishment, which will leave you feeling and being truly productive.

3. "If I don’t multitask, I’ll fall behind others at work."

Capture: Recognize when this competitive thought arises and understand that feeling behind often reflects a lack of prioritization, not productivity.

Challenge: Ask, “Am I truly falling behind, or am I focusing on tasks that don’t need my immediate attention? Who would I be without comparing myself to others? How would you feel without this thought?”

Change: Start prioritizing tasks by urgency and importance, not by how much you can handle at once. Working for impact rather than trying to do everything helps you gain more influence in your role and reduces the stress of feeling constantly “behind.”

4. "My role requires me to handle a lot at once—I don’t have the luxury of focus."

Capture: When you feel overwhelmed, identify which tasks truly require immediate attention versus those that can be scheduled. Check if busyness has become a badge of honor to demonstrate your importance and value.

Challenge: Remind yourself that the highest performers prioritize strategic focus, not speed. Ask, “Could focusing on fewer things actually improve my results and my well-being? With fewer distractions interupting my flow, how can I be more strategic or creative?”

Change: Begin with one small action—turn off notifications for a set period each day to create a block of uninterrupted time. This small shift can improve your focus and help you complete tasks more efficiently, often freeing up more time than you expected. When you are highly engaged and concentrating on something challenging, you can get into in a mental flow state. This enables your cognitive abilities are at their best and you also feel motivated and fulfilled.

RELATED:  Addressing Common Gaps in Time Management & Prioritization 

5. "I need to respond immediately to be seen as reliable and responsive."

Capture: When the urge to respond immediately arises, pause and question its necessity. Evaluate how this fits into your priotities that you are currently working on.

Challenge: Ask, “Is my immediate response truly necessary, or can I reply once I’ve completed my current task? Will others view you as less reliable or reponsive if you respond a short while later? How would you feel if you weren't trying to constantly prove that you are reliable and responsive?”

Change: To improve work-life balance, try setting specific times to check and respond to emails and messages. Let others know your schedule if needed. This focused time protects your flow and sends a message of reliability based on quality rather than immediacy. Also, when you are responding immediately, you are consistently allowing others to determine your actions. Stand firm in a decision to redefine reliability and responsiveness based on consistency of results where you are deciding your immediate priorities.

6. "Multitasking is the norm—everyone else is doing it."

Capture: Notice when comparison starts to influence your behavior. Pause and question why are you looking at others when you know that you are performing at your best in this current situation.

Challenge: Ask, “Are those multitasking actually producing better work, or are they struggling like I am? How would you feel if you weren't comparing yourself to others and could be content with your own performance?”

Change: Take the lead by modeling focused, single-tasking behavior. Set the example for your team, showing that it’s possible to achieve high-quality work without the chaos of multitasking. Not only will your work improve, but you may inspire others to follow suit, creating a healthier workplace culture.

7. "I’m good at handling multiple things at once, so why change?"

Capture: Recognize this thought when you feel the urge to take on multiple tasks, even when you’re already busy.

Challenge: Reflect on past moments of multitasking and ask, “Did handling many things at once really benefit my work-life balance, or did it add to my stress?”

Change: Experiment with single-tasking for one week and observe the results. Begin each day by listing your top three priorities and focus on tackling one at a time. You may find that single-tasking actually enables you to accomplish more meaningful work with less mental strain.

RELATED: True or False: Multi-Tasking Improves Productivity

Embracing a New Path to Work-Life Balance

Stopping distracted and half finished tasks that are a symtpom of multi-tasking has multiple benefits for your performance at work, your sense of calm and the amount of time you have for everything outside of work that is important to you.

By capturing, challenging, and changing your beliefs about multitasking, you can create a work approach that allows you to “work with all your heart, as working for the Lord” (Colossians 3:23-24). This mindset shift not only increases your focus and productivity but also aligns your work with God’s design for your life. When we dedicate ourselves fully to each task, we honor Him in our work and allow the Holy Spirit to guide us, transforming stress into peace.

As you implement any of these, if at any point if you get stuck or feel yourself falling into old patterns, a little bit of prayer can help you. When you are at your weakest, God can show His strength, if you let Him. 

Imagine a workday filled with purpose, where you complete each task with focus, free from the constant pull to do more. By shifting away from multitasking, you can open the door to a work-life balance that prioritizes what matters most: faith, family, and a deeper connection to God.

I pray...

I hope you find this advice on multitasking helpful. If you’re ready to relieve stress and improve work-life balance, consider this approach to capture, challenge and changing your beliefs and thoughts. These may be contributing to your stress and lack or harmony and balance. Breaking free of thoughts and work habits related to multi-tasking, enables you to begin to reclaim your time and restore your energy. Even small changes can make a big difference over time. By starting with small, faith-centered steps, like stopping the distractions, you’ll begin to experience the benefits of a calm, centered approach to work.

Only you and God know what's best for you. Let Him guide you to find the right balance and ways of working. You can reduce work-related stress and working hours while still being successful. With the extra time, you can spend more time with loved ones, get more sleep, or enjoy your favorite hobbies. This will help you achieve greater work-life harmony.

Interested in making this change last? Download my free guide to building tiny faith-driven habits that promote focused time and peace. With these small steps, you can break free from the cycle of distraction, deepen your relationship with God, and achieve a greater sense of work-life harmony.

Consider this:

• When you're on a phone call, working on a different document, and responding to a text from someone else, how effective are you really being? 
• When you're watching a video call, having lunch, and chatting with your daughter, how present are you? 
• You might feel like you're accomplishing a lot, but what is the quality of each of these tasks?

Myth of multi-tasking

In our 24/7 world, multi-tasking is one the greatest fallacies on how to best manage time. Multitasking has become a cultural norm, often seen as a skill to master. Studies show, that only about 2.5% of people are able to multi-task effectively. Yet, multi-tasking can reduce your productivity by 40% while increasing stress.

I want to clarify the definition of multitasking that I am using. It refers to when someone tries to do multiple things at the same time. I'm talking about tackling two relatively complex tasks simultaneously, not just simple tasks like walking and chewing gum, or patting your head and rubbing your stomach.

The FAA and OSHA have conducted research on the impact of multitasking on productivity for years, and their recommendations are clear. Many states have even implemented laws banning texting and driving or requiring hands-free devices, recognizing that distraction reduces response time and significantly increases risk.

It is truly sad to hear leaders boast about their multitasking skills when, in reality, their lack of prioritization and focus leads to chaos, disorganization, and constantly changing demands for their teams. (I must admit, I once believed in the myth of multitasking until I realized how important quiet, focused work time is for catching my breath and encouraging others to do the same.) These are often the same leaders who expect all workers to skip breaks and multitask during them. When an organization or a leader promotes multitasking, who really benefits? Taking a holistic and objective view, what does it communicate about valued characteristics?

(Note: Sometimes I've seen job descriptions or heard others mention multitasking as a skill when it's really about managing multiple projects or a complex workload to ensure no small details are missed. However, I'm not addressing this definition in this article.)

Why Multi-Tasking Doesn't Work - and Might Be Adding to Your Stress

Personally, I believe that the culture of rushing and multi-tasking, where people prioritize feeling productive over actually being productive, is contributing to the separation in modern society - separation from God, from each other, and within ourselves. There are numerous ways in which multi-tasking negatively affects our physical and mental well-being, as well as our overall performance.

Here’s why: when you’re dividing your focus across multiple tasks, your brain can’t give any of them the attention they deserve. You end up making more mistakes, feeling scattered, and dealing with constant cognitive tension as unfinished tasks linger in the background.

Splintered focus and attention as you work on complex problems means that nothing gets done well. The work is more prone to error. If you are studying to build new skills, less is retained. When tasks are left unfinished it creates cognitive tension, stress & anxiety until you get back to it and finish it.

Instead of feeling fulfilled, you may end up feeling drained, both mentally and spiritually, disconnected from your purpose and even from God’s guidance.

The Impact of Multitasking on Your Body and Mind

Multitasking doesn’t just affect your productivity; it also has profound effects on your physical and mental health:

Increased Fatigue

Being constantly alert to multiple sources of information can cause a persistent low-level stress response in the body. Biochemically, our body is responding like an ancient hunter alert to danger and feeling a lack of safety. Distractions and a heightened state of alertness can cause your brain to use up more glucose, leading to increased fatigue and a stronger desire for quick energy boosts. (Understanding these factors has personally helped me better manage my stress eating triggers. )

Impaired Digestion

When it comes to digestion, it's not just about putting food in your mouth and chewing. Eating while working or on the go can negatively impact your digestion because of the interaction between your gut and brain. This can prevent you from getting the maximum nutrition from your food, leading to reduced energy and increased fatigue. Eating small amounts quickly can also leave you feeling hungrier than if you had taken your time to enjoy your meal. If you eat too fast and don't allow your body to respond, you may end up overeating before feeling full.

Reduced Ability to Focus

Constant digital distractions, such as responding to notifications, encourage a habit of switching tasks. Frequent multitasking rewires your brain. When you keep shifting gears mentally & environmentally between different tasks, it takes time to refocus & reorient. We lose the ability to easily access the parts of the brain for deeper processing and learning. It is harder to focus deeply, retain information, and work toward long-term goals. It also contributes to decreased self-control and increased impatience. 

Bottom line, focusing on one thing at a time reduces stress and prevents you from feeling drained of energy. Being more focused at work and less scattered from multitasking can free up more time for your faith, family, and personal interests. It also improves your performance and productivity, allowing you to accomplish more in less time. Taking this key step to change your work habits can help improve your work-life balance.

Multitasking vs. Single-Tasking: Creating Room for the Holy Spirit

In Biblical times, there was not the distractions there are in the modern world. Yet even in those simpler times there is guidance on prioritization (and at a bit of a stretch on multi-tasking since I’m not sure it was a “thing” yet). In  Luke 10:38-42, we see the story of Mary and Martha, where Martha is busy with preparations and distracted by many tasks, while Mary chooses to sit at Jesus’ feet, fully present and focused. Jesus tells Martha, “few things are needed—or indeed only one.” Mary’s single-minded focus on Jesus was the “better” choice.

In your work, out of all the responsibilities that may feel urgent, focusing on one task at a time can help you connect more deeply to your faith, reduce stress, and create space for God’s guidance. When you’re singularly focused, you can bring purpose and excellence to each task.

Story of Martha

In Luke, there is a short story about when Jesus and the disciples visited Mary & Martha’s home. Martha was distracted and busy doing everything she could to be an excellent hostess to Jesus and the disciples. When she asked Jesus to allow her sister Mary to help her, Martha was advised to

Mary’s choice to focus on “only one” reminds us that there is peace and wisdom in single-tasking. When we’re constantly distracted, we miss the chance to deepen our relationship with God, just as Martha missed an opportunity to listen to Jesus.

Think about what this means at work – out of all of your workload that is causing you stress and worry, only a few things are a priority and amongst those only one thing should be focused on at a time.

RELATED:  Addressing Common Gaps in Prioritization 

Steps to Embrace Single-Tasking for a Balanced, Faith-Centered Life

You are at your most productive, creative, and strategic self when you maintain a singular focus without distractions. There are fewer errors and likelihood of rework if you put in an hour of single-minded focus on a task than if you put in 90 minutes with a lot of distractions and interruptions. 

To relieve stress and improve work-life balance, consider replacing multitasking with intentional single-tasking. Here are some practical ways to make this shift:

1. Create Dedicated Time Blocks for Focused Work
   Set specific times during your day to work with all notifications turned off. During these blocks, focus entirely on one task or project. This will allow you to enter a state of flow, where you’re fully immersed and productive, freeing you to finish tasks more quickly and effectively.
2. Pause and Pray Before Each Task
   Before starting a new task, take a moment to pray or simply breathe deeply, inviting the Holy Spirit to guide your work. This small pause can help you center yourself, stay mindful, and prevent your mind from jumping to the next thing.
3. Practice Mindful Eating for Greater Energy and Focus
   Rather than eating at your desk or while on the go, make time to eat mindfully. Sit down, slow down, and be present with your meal. This practice not only improves digestion but also allows you to fully nourish yourself, providing the physical energy you need to get through your day.

There’s a benefit of less stress when you have fewer incomplete tasks vying for attention and when you feel that you submitted quality work for an assignment. Additionally, you feel more accomplished because activities are checked off of your to do list, instead of lingering in that “almost done” state.

By being more productive from greater levels of focus instead of scattered multi-tasking, you should be able to finish your work done in fewer hours, so that you have more time for loved ones, self-care and personal interests.

RELATED: Don't Despise the Small Actions

I pray...

I hope you find this advice on multitasking helpful. If you’re ready to relieve stress and improve work-life balance, consider developing a simple habit of a single focus session each day or taking a break to eat lunch without distractions. Even small changes can make a big difference over time. By starting with small, faith-centered steps, you’ll begin to experience the benefits of a calm, centered approach to work.

Only you and God know what's best for you. Let Him guide you to find the right balance and ways of working. You can reduce work-related stress and working hours while still being successful. With the extra time, you can spend more time with loved ones, get more sleep, or enjoy your favorite hobbies. This will help you achieve greater work-life harmony.

Interested in making this change last? Download my free guide to building tiny faith-driven habits that promote focused time and peace. With these small steps, you can break free from the cycle of distraction, deepen your relationship with God, and achieve a greater sense of work-life harmony.

It is exhausting to always work at this high intensity & pressure. However, there are rewards and and positive outcomes associated with this behavior pattern:

• Recognition from others
• Adrenaline rush of dealing with crises, leading to a release of dopamine when a solution is found
• Sense of fulfillment of being needed & valued for your contributions
• Creatively resolving complex problems keeps you challenged & your creative juices flowing

These keep you striving ahead and willing (and maybe a bit excited) to suit up as a hero.

As you strive to reduce stress and improve work-life balance, addressing the tendency and desire to be the hero becomes an important challenge. Let’s look a bit more into heroism at work and then get to how you can start addressing it.

Crisis Management

Many of us have learned to call on our inner superhero as a crisis adaptation. It is a great skill to have, especially in high stress and high pressure situations. Organizations need individuals who are willing to confront and solve urgent issues without avoiding the challenge or freezing with denial, inaction, or indecisiveness. You look back to the years of the COVID; every organization had an immense challenge to figure out. Ideas on keeping employees safe, serving customers, and adapting the business came from anyone in the organization willing to speak up and take action.

Here are a few examples of these hero archetypes.

Team Oriented Corporate Hero Archetypes

• Firefighters go from fire to fire, addressing what is of highest urgency until the next urgent crisis happens. The first issue gets resolved enough that it won’t flare up. Hopefully, the issue has been solved well enough to prevent recurrence, even if it is still smoldering. For example, a customer backorder only gets resolved enough to keep them happy for a short period. The root problem has not been fully addressed. They might have another backorder in a few months / weeks as this has only been addressed at the top level. I’ve also heard people call this approach “a game of smoke and mirrors,” managing the perception but not the underlying business systems.
• Trauma medics keep putting tourniquets and bandages to stop the bleed out. They stay with the issue until the bleeding has stopped. They apply temporary solutions to an issue. Continuing with the back-order situation trauma medics continue to work on the customer's back-order situation until stocks are built back up and the customer feels like the issue is solved. This delves deeper into the issues than firefighting does, but it still doesn’t solve what the underlying problem.

Personal Oriented Corporate Hero Archetypes

• Superheroes fly in and, through their personal efforts & expertise, magically solve an issue that others can’t. These individuals have in-depth knowledge of systems, processes, or equipment and are the only ones capable of solving certain issues. In the back-order example, they have a key relationship with the customer or supplier and come to an agreement or a quick fix to mitigate the issue.
• Lone rangers ride in on a white horse and save the day. They focus on personal efforts (maybe with a trusted sidekick). In the TV show, the bad guy gets locked up, and the problem is permanently solved by the end of the episode. In the real world, the lone ranger gets much credit for addressing the surface issues. The sidekick only gets a bit of a reflected recognition. In the back-order example, the person goes in and works with the supplier or manufacturing department to get to a quick fix to mitigate the issue. There is more hands-on involvement and interaction than the superhero.

I’m sure you’ve seen these heroes at work at some point in your career. (You may have been one of them.)

In healthy organizations under strong leadership, these crisis situations are followed by a team doing a deep-dive root-cause analysis to determine what caused the problem and how to prevent it from reoccurring.

Biblical Example of Healthy Crisis Management - Queen Esther

In the Bible, Esther is an example of someone taking effective, courageous action in the face of a crisis. Once she learned of the plot to wipe out the Jewish people, she took immediate action. Then, she took appropriate actions to ensure the challenges were solved long-term.

When I read the story and imagine how I would respond in the situation she faced, she provides a great role model of how to work under stress in a high-pressure crisis situation and then carry through on all the details to ensure the Jews could not be threatened like that again under Xerxes reign.

Key Points

• She demonstrated strategic planning and risk assessment. First she sought counsel from God, a wise advisor (Mordecai) and the friendly support of her maidens. Then she carefully mapped her risks and planned her approach to talk to the king and gain his support.
• At the risk of her life, she approached King Xerxes to quickly confronted the crisis head-on.
• Because of her pre-planning and God’s support, she effectively advocated for resources and support. Persuasive and authentic, she gained King Xerxes sympathy and willingness to intervene.
• Due to her influence, the king issued a decree to counteract Haman’s evil plan. Esther was also wily enough to ensure justice was served to Haman. Yet, her efforts did not stop there.
• She followed up after the decree to ensure the actions were implemented. Esther and Mordecai ensured that the decree had the desired outcome of saving the Jews.
• Since she was not just focused on the short-term issue, she ensured the Jewish people had a right to assemble and protect themselves long term. It allowed them to triumph over enemies.
• Recognition and remembrance (like lessons learned) were also important to her, so Purim was celebrated for the first time and is part of the annual days of remembrance even now.
• Besides benefitting her people, this directly benefitted Esther & Mordecai.

Role Model

Esther is an excellent example of how to calmly handle a crisis, even when there are high personal stakes. Keep in mind, she found it abhorent that she was compelled to be married to a Gentile - even though he was the king. So as part of her actions, she had to get over her own feelings to improve her relationship with King Xerxes to best serve her people. She was recognized by the Jewish people and the Persian court for her efforts, which is similar to the recognition received at work by uplines, stakeholders and others in the organization.

If she was only acted like a firefighter, medic, superhero or medic, the Jews would not have Purim today and they may not have been able to defend themselves against their enemies while under King Xerxes reign.

(Let me know in the comments if there are any other leadership lessons you find as you re-read and meditate on Esther. Looking for other Biblical examples of effective crisis leadership,  Nehemiah and Judith (if you haven't heard of her, she's in Catholic & Orthodox Bibles and goes to extreme lengths to save the Jewish people; Judith & 1 Clement 55:4-6).)

RELATED: Addressing Common Gaps in Prioritization 

Corporate Hero Leadership - Short Term Focus & Ineffective

Yet, there are other situations in which being the hero is not for a short period, but an everyday role. The focus is on quick fixes to solve issues in the short term. When this occurs, issues reoccur at some point. Resources keep getting diverted away from long term growth & improvement to constantly trying to stay in front of the latest problem. It is exhausting for everyone involved - robbing time and energy from other initiatives at work and from personal lives. The leadership keep using the urgency and importance of the latest crisis to demand intense efforts and dedication beyond "normal" working hours.

I see this pattern occurring in two different scenarios.

Organization Hero Culture

Sometimes, this is an organizational strategic or cultural issue. You can tell when you look around and see that the only people who thrive and survive act as heroes, saving the day daily. Almost no one gets recognized or promoted for putting in new systems or process improvements or effectively doing the daily work to sustain the day-to-day business.

Generally, these organizations have a more short-term focus than seeking to invest resources into building processes and systems for long-term success. This can also exist in division or department pockets, depending on a key leader's preferred leadership and management style.

It will be your call on how toxic this environment is to you and your goals for work-life balance. Before you start job hunting, don’t assume that because this is the overriding culture or strategy, you can’t change your area of the organization. With your history of success at this organization, you have influence and can make changes that can help you and your team. More on this in a bit.

Personal Leadership or Management Style

Being the hero is sometimes a personal leadership or management style adopted, reinforced, and sustained over the years. Taking heroic actions daily adds pressure, increases stress, and commits to your time. It’s a cycle of exhaustion. Maybe it started as:

• A successful adaptation at one company (or department) you have now brought to another environment where it is unnecessary.
• You took on more than you could handle and got stretched thin. As you prioritized what you could handle, you realized that you could be successful just going from crisis to crisis. People around you were okay if you dropped the ball on smaller items because of your larger contributions.
• Being a bit of an adrenaline junkie. You find periods without crisis flat and unfulfilling at work, so seek projects that keep you on edge. Or you remain hypervigilant in risk management mode to prevent or detect the next crisis on the horizon - ready to jump into action. 
• You moved from being an expert in an individual contributor role to a leadership role. You thought, “It takes less time if I just do it myself,” or “This is so sensitive, I don’t trust anyone else with it but myself.” 

Regardless of your motivation to adopt this style of leadership, when there is no time or effort to solve problems and put in permanent fixes - issues reoccur. They may not be exactly the same, but as you look at the root, they are related. 

Personal evaluation

When you decide that it is more important to spend time with loved ones and care for yourself, you need to make the hard decision if this time consuming and energy draining approach will still work with who you want to be. It takes stepping back and thinking about who you really want to be and whether heroic leadership or management style supports that. As you try to be as successful at home and in your personal life as at work, it is probably time for you to rethink these behaviors.

I can sense the resistance and hear that quiet voice inside you:

It is just how I work. I've received a lot of recognition and been so successful working this way. It is core to how people perceive me at work. I can’t change this; I’ll get fired for sure. Heroics are how I’ve been successful. I’d rather figure out how to work fewer hours with a few productivity or administrative improvements to my ways of working.

I get what you are feeling - I’m a crisis and deadline-driven adrenaline junkie in recovery that was hypervigilant about potential risks. There were times when that quiet period between emergencies was harder than being caught up in the invigorating chaos and crazy of the latest crisis. Learning to be comfortable and happy in those calmer moments took introspection, prayer, healing, and time. But that’s a story for another day about how work, worth, and identity can all get tied together.

For now, I’ll address how to make small changes in your work habits that let you practice and develop other valuable crisis management skills. These will help you find the space to slow down and catch your breath, reducing your stress and the high-pressure load at work.

RELATED: Productivity Improvements Over Time Management

Small changes to transform heroic leadership into sustainable success

Whether you are looking to make changes for your department inside an organizational culture or your personal leadership style, here are a few starting points to consider:

Problem Solving & Root Cause Analysis

• As you and the triage team are deciding on assignments, ensure someone is working one deeper problem solving efforts with the people closest to the problem
• Point out the repeating theme of several of these crises and suggest that you can lead a task force to get to the root cause so it reduces the likelihood of repeating

Process Improvements

• Convert short-term actions to more long-term process improvements (it may not be root cause, but it closes more gaps than the immediate triage efforts)
• Before you move off of incident response, make sure resources have a clear action plan on what remains to be accomplished (e.g. procedures to update, training to complete, systems)

Accountability

• Ensure loose ends get wrapped up by assigning someone to complete the activity
• Set up follow-up sessions after the closure of the incident response and establish checks to ensure everything gets closed out

Early Detection

• If there aren’t resources yet to get into problem-solving, as part of the closeout, at least identify a documented process for early detection. Catching issues earlier mitigates the impact.

Testing 

• Once all loose ends are closed, run a “mock drill” to prove the solutions' effectiveness. This can also be done to test early detection process checks. From this, make a determination if that was effective enough to prevent another crisis. If not, ensure gaps are closed from the latest findings.

Lessons learned

• Keep a running file of lessons learned. While it solves nothing, it can help make solving similar issues faster. When deep in crisis mode, this may be a simple first step. Then, go through the file in a quieter time or as part of strategic planning, and use it for identifying initiatives. I’m sure you’ve found your memory of these crises blurs the different incidents into each other, and the recency effect keeps the details of the last one or two at the top of your mind.

Delegate

• If you find yourself being the superhero or lone ranger, develop others on your team. If you keep saying to youself - "It's faster if I do it myself." or "No one can do this as good as I do." - nothing will change until you develop and learn to trust the people on your team.
• Have them take more actions while you are mentoring them. Yes, it may take a bit of time upfront, but in the long run, more people can learn and grow. It frees up your time in the long-term.
• Trust, development and involvement are also motivational, encouraging people to put in that additional increment of discretional efforts.
• Your upline also recognizes that you have trained your backfill, so they will be more comfortable promoting you or moving you to another role.

Recognize

• Motivate your team and peers by recognizing when people take action to deliver long-term benefits instead of just short term wins.
• Set up systems to benefit and encourage those that put in the effort to keep the business running smoothly. You may be surprised by the impact of focusing on doing the right thing per the existing processes and procedures reduces the number of things that go wrong.
• Hero culture sometimes also creates a set of negative behaviors. When resources are needed, people may have been influenced to let things slip into crisis or to be portrayed as an emergency, since otherwise they wouldn't get the needed support.

Benefits of these small changes

If you and your team take some time each day during incident response to dig deeper into problem-solving and ensure the root cause is addressed (not just identified). You want to increase the amount of time that you publicly (and privately) recognize people who did the hard work of problem-solving and preventive action. Ensure you advertise how well your team prevents problems when you go to your boss’ staff meetings. You and your team must represent yourselves strongly amongst all the heroes at the table to help get more people invested in preventing problems. Slowly you can get out of crisis mode:

• Problems stop recurring (or recur less frequently)
• More people know how to deal with issues
• Others see your success & calmness during a crisis and adopt your approach for prevention
• Stakeholders value when the business runs smoothly with less expensive crises and can invest that money in more growth

This reduces your stress while, at the same time, your value to the organization is also greater.

My hope for you...

The Biblical examples of leadership through crisis give you the inspiration to make small adjustments in your leadership & management style.

With practice and training, implementing strategies to manage work-related stress and prioritize your time will become easier. As you get out of a constant frantic, high-pressure crisis mode, you will find that you have more time and energy for loved ones, personal interests, and self-care. You will also experience greater work-life harmony.

By taking time for relationships and activities that nourish your body, mind, and spirit, you will be living more of the life that God intends for you. Remember, God is always present, and by surrendering to Him and allowing the Holy Spirit to guide you, you'll find the strength and courage to overcome challenges and grow, ultimately leading to a flourishing life.

Interested in this approach and want to learn more about how you can go deeper into using your existing time management skills to help you improve your work-life harmony and reducing your stress?  Book a free consultation.

Depending on your situation, you may be able to actively manage a fixed boundary or you need one that has some room for improvement and is directed by aspiration.

Not necessarily about time

Boundaries can be set on many things. It doesn't have to be time. For example, I've known people to get very clear on communication, types of interactions, when and what types of food they eat, as they set their boundaries. For the purposes of this article, I'll focus on time boundaries.

What's most important

Even as you set a time boundary, you need to know what you are protecting and why. It doesn't have to be a current need, but can be an aspirational desire. It all comes down to what is most important to you. A few examples:

• Dinner at home so everyone can sit down together and share their day
• Time to exercise, walk the dog, help the kids with homework before dinner
• Making & eating breakfast with your spouse after Bible study in the morning
• Working less than one evening a week from home and no weekend work

Anchor in identity

The boundary is easier to maintain if you think about it less as time or an activity that you are protecting but about who you are and who you want to be. For example, when a former smoker is offered a cigarette which helps them be more powerful and convicted (even to themself): "I'm trying to quit" or "I'm not a smoker."

As Christians our greatest identity is in relationship to Him. Is there a viewpoint that can help you stand firm after you set this boundary? 

• My body is a temple for Holy Spirit so I need to take care of it.
• I am a child of God and I want my children to feel I treat them that way too.
• I am precious in His sight as my spouse is in mine.

Do you see how that completely changes the importance of the boundary you are setting? As you set your boundary, you may be less likely to allow it to be trampled on. Just as we need to make decisions and have the strngeth of faith to pass through the narrow gate to Heaven, you will also filter your decisions and actions through a narrow gate of what you allow inside that boundary.

Where are you feeling unbalanced?

Sometimes what you want and aspire for seems too far away from the current state. You aren't sure how to prioritize which behavior to put a boundary around that will result in something you can reasonably accomplish. In this case, another approach is to figure out any unbalanced or unhealthy behavior that you are doing related to work and curb it back to what is a reasonable expectation. If you have difficulty identifying any, check in with a loved one that can help you be honest. A few examples to consider, do you need to stop :

• sending emails between 9p - 6a?
• refusing to take at least one day off each week?
• working 60+ hours a week for one job?
• seeing your children sleping more than awake?
• speaking less than a 1000 words in a day to your spouse?
• not taking more than 10 minutes to eat?
• checking your work phone every 30 minutes in case you missed something?

When you engage in these behaviors, what messages are you sending others? You may want to include this as part of what you address as you identify which behaviors to address first.

RELATED: Setting Priorities 

Decide on a primary tactic & framework for your boundary

Once you've determined what is most important to you and why, it is time to make a decision of how you will protect the time for this precious activity. This will be a bit different in every situation. Here are a few common ones.

• Are you worried about total hours?
  • Do you need a set departure time from work? 
  • Do you adjust the settings in calendar and communicate to others, that if you haven't accepted a meeting that you won't be there?
  • Do you need to be actively managing the expectations from others? 

If you desire, meditate on your situation and the metaphor in Matthew 7:13-15 to help you gain perspective.

There were a few periods in my career I was using early mornings to get quiet, focused work done at home. It allowed me to spend evenings with my sweetie and have a bit of coffee with him before heading out for the day. Once people realized I was regularly logging in early for my time zone versus their time zone - it did not take long for meetings to start showing up super early. Yet, my public calendar showed I didn't accept meetings until several hours later, so I had to be very selective about sending emails, accepting calls and meetings in that window before it became something everyone expected of me. 

Framework options

Boundaries don't always have to be as fixed or defined as a fortress or a fence and gate. Think about a balloon - the wall of the balloon separates the air inside and outside. There is a lot of flexibility to keep allowing in more air, but there is a limit before it pops. I'll go through an example similar to this since it is likely less familiar to you than something simpler to assess.

If you are making a fixed boundary, make sure you are setting it for what is reasonable to manage now. Keep the gate narrow. You want to be successful 8 out 10 lines, so you don't get defeated easily. If you set it on your aspirational goal and can only protect your boundary 3 out of 10 times, you'll feel bad about it and it will be harder to change. You'll also be anabling the negative or destructive behavior that you are trying to change. 

Top & Bottom Lines

I was first exposed to the concept of top and bottom lines through Workaholics Anonymous (great resources and support if you need it). These define a flexible range of outcomes and point you toward what you aspire to do and become. As you work towards the aspirational goal (top line), the range of desired behaviors change. For those of you that are familiar with statistical process control - think about this similarly to tightening the control limits based on demonstrated reduction of variability.

Sleep is a simple illustration of how this can work. Your personal minimally functioning bottom line may be 5 hours per night. After a week of that little sleep, you can still safely focus and have reasonable energy. You've been getting by for months on 5-6 hours of sleep during the week. Yet, you aspire to sleep at least 7 hours per night. That gets you feeling awesome! So your initial boundary is "I sleep at least 5 hours, and prefer to get at least 7 hours per night."

Do you see how this differs than saying I want to set a boundary based on the statement "I am trying to get more sleep and want to sleep at least 6 hours per night?" In this scenario, sleeping less than 6 hours still occurs on a regular basis. So as you track your success, there will be more misses and you will either become disheartened or just start ignoring them.

When you are facing a complex or challenging situation, Top & Bottom lines set you up for a stronger mindset where there is greater rate of success and more motivation to continue to improve.

Continuing with this example, top and bottom lines means that you won't intentionally allow anything to infringe on this boundary. Of course, there may be a horrible travel day that goes awry that gets you less sleep than that. If you get less than 5 hours of sleep, you need to immediately triage what happened, rally your support resources, figure out how you will recover and get back on track. Maybe, you have a pre-defined plan that if this happens you work a half day so you can catch up on sleep the next night. Over time as you get better routines, you can slowly change the range to be 6-7 hours of sleep. Let's get into how to set this up.

Bottom Lines

Bottom lines define the base condition, the line that you do not want to cross. Think of it as a red stop light. Technically you could blow through it, but your safety and that of others is at risk. Bottom lines can be written as negative or affirmative statements. These should be set up for realistic & successful achievement, rather than for a higher likelihood of failure. Examples include:

• On Monday & Wednesday, I leave work for the gym by 6p.
• I do not allow work to encroach upon the time I commit to be with family, including 7p - 9p Monday to Friday.
• I do not work more than 60 hours per week and no more than 12 hours per day Monday to Friday.

Set it based on your tolerance for what happens if this bottom line boundary is crossed - do you and your loved ones agree it is acceptable if once a week you break a commitment or does it need to be less frequent? Be realistic about what is achievable so you have a solid point to improve upon.

Don't forget to set up your plan for if you have a miss of the bottom line. It is better to plan in advance when you have a clear head and feel less pressure on how you will get back on track. Every time the bottom line is crossed, you want to triage it and figure out what to learn from the situation. To ensure you stay on the path of improvement, you don't want to get used to accepting that this boundary can be crossed or trampled on by your choices. This keeps the gate narrow so life affirming choices are encouraged instead of many potentially destructive ones.

Top Lines

Top lines define the aspirational goal or vision. They remind you of what you want and what you are working toward. You want to combine it with that identify statement we discussed earlier. Examples include:

• My body is a temple for Holy Spirit. I need to take care of it, so I will spend 2 hours at the gym through the workweek.
• I am a child of God and I want my children to feel I treat them that way too. I will do something fun that they pick with my children every day of the week.
• I am precious in His sight as my spouse is in mine. I will be home more, help more & have date night, so I will not work more than 55 hours per week and no more than 10 hours per day Monday to Friday.

Do you see more clearly how the top and bottom lines complement each other? They give you a clear current state and future state and have a motivational factor built in. Going back to the Workaholic's Anonymous Book of Recovery - "While our bottom lines free us from pain, our top lines promise us joy and fulfillment."

Reinforce & Keep the Gate Narrow

As a reminder, the reason you are setting a boundary is to set yourself up sucessfully for change. The less likely you are to allow an activity or someone to infringe on your boundary, the more successful you are. This applies for both fixed and top / bottom line boundaries.

Others around you only know that you have a boundary if you are proactively communicating it and have reinforcing processes and systems. Writing all of this down and putting it on a Post-It Note on your computer or in an electonic notification is not going to lead to successful change. Once you set your boundary, inform your allies and ask them to help you brainstorm on what actions you need to take to be successful.

On a final note, you probably want to have a tracker of some sort - old fashioned paper or a virtual task tracker. When you hit a rough spot, it shows you the improvements so you can factually address any lies your mind or feelings may tell you about how "you can't change" or "you never get it right." If you are doing top and bottom line styles of boundaries, it can also help you decide when you can confidently move the bottom line closer to the top line.

RELATED: How to Maintain Boundaries 

Are You Willing to Experiment for Yourself?

Try these tips out for a few weeks and see how they work for you. At the end of each week you'll want to check in about how the approach felt and how it is working for you. There are many ways to protect what is most precious to you and to achieve your core identity, so you just need to determine what works best. This is not a test of will-power! Nor is it about being aggressive to others to reinforce your fortress wall. Setting & maintaining boundaries a process. When you need help or get in a bind, a little bit of prayer and God-fidence can give you strength and help you make the next right decision.

If you have not worked with setting boundaries before, you probably want to pick a small one to start with to build success and momentum. In each of the examples above, it is all about improving departure times so an initial baby-step boundary of one of those could be:

I set an alarm for 5:30p to finalize my thoughts and close & save files, where I shut down the computer by 5:45p because I am precious in His sight as my spouse is in mine. I will be home more, help more & regularly have date night. I aspire to no work more than 55 hours per week and no more than 10 hours per day Monday to Friday.

Structuring your boundary with a clear anchor and behavior makes it very specific, so you are more likely to follow through. As you train and build the habit, this structure also gives you room in case if you need to clear your desk, organize for the next day, finalize call backs and other followups, or do a brain dump. Then you can make steady improvements from there to "I leave my office space by 6p" and move on to "I am in my car (or living room if you work from home) by 6p." This approach trains you to a positive growth mindset, recognizing each of the small little wins and shows what is achievable.

RELATED: TBD - Habits

My hope for you...

With these small tips and tricks, I pray that you are able to stop feeling like:

• your clendar and others are running your day
• others have more say in how you spend your time than you do

With practice and training with a set process (not trying harder) it becomes easier to make more changes in how you work. There is a substantial return on investment for the effort to establish and maintain time boundaries.

As you fulfill your commitments and protect your boundaries, you quickly start experiencing greater work-life harmony and feeling less stress. Boundaries are not just for you to manage work and getting home from work at a reasonable hour. The real reason you are doing this is to make time for relationships and activities that nourish your body, mind, and spirit, so you thrive and flourish with the life that God intends for you.

Interested in this approach and want to learn more about how you can go deeper into using your existing time management skills to help you improve your work-life harmony and reducing your stress?  Book a free consultation.

If my references to Workaholic's Anonymous has you reflecting on your own behavior and choices, do check out their resources. I also suggest Bryan E Robinson's books. Feel free to email or use the consultation link to meet with me, if you just need to talk to someone about what is going on.

Time debting is scarcity thinking. We have enough time for the important things in life. What we prioritize and get done each day are what we deem as the highest priorities in that moment. Anything you cancelled, skipped, didn't give full attention to, you made the decision to treat as a lower priority. 

Examples of time debt

Back in college, I learned to use time debting when I was trying to reduce how long it would take to graduate. My junior year I had severely overbooked myself with ROTC, Army Reserves, classes, and work. I was sleeping only 2-4 hours per night and almost no social life. I juggled assignments and test preparations to get by. That same year, I kept canceling the time I scheduled to process and file my taxes. I filed late and paid penalties. 

There is also a smaller scale version of time debting that frequently occurs, every time you sacrifice a break or some sleep for another activity. These choices lead to increased exhaustion and reduced energy. The body needs this time to recover. You can only “borrow” your body’s maintenance and rest time, so long before it starts breaking down. Think about this like car maintenance – skipping oil changes and minor repairs can only take you so many miles before a more significant breakdown occurs. Gobbling your food and eating on the run is another example, as you have decided that another activity is more important than nourishing yourself. Digestive issues occur and add strain to your body.

Those are fairly clear-cut examples, here are a few less obvious behaviors that can indicate a pattern of time debting:
•Chronic tardiness
•Overdelivering on something but underdelivering on another
•Not following through
•Avoiding responsibilities or commitments
•Overpromising
•Perfectionism
•Regularly losing track of things (time, deadlines, bills, verbal agreements)
•Speeding or driving unsafely to make up time

I think you get the idea.

Which behaviors do you recognize that you engage in? How do they contribute to your feelings of overwhelm or stress? How do they impact your belief that there is not enough time for everything?

RELATED: Addressing Common Gaps in Prioritization 

Impact assessment

Individuals that rely on time debting find that it impacts relationships, particularly the one with ourselves. Too many times self-care – sleep, exercise, play, relax, spiritual practice & enough time to eat – are the sacrifices to do something for work or home.

 
Have you been selecting work tasks over relationships and responsibilities at home? How has time debting impacted your relationships?

 
Look at how this is impacting your work performance. Are any of these behaviors impacting how people perceive you? Are you getting feedback about inconsistency?

 
In the above example from when I was a student, time debting impacted:

• Performance – I barely passed my classes because of how I juggled skipping assignments. My professors remembered my inconsistency when I had them for future classes.
• Reputation & Relationships – I disappeared on my friends. When I resurfaced, I was so exhausted that many friends and colleagues thought I had a substance abuse issue or a major disease.
• Cost me money – You can’t escape taxes, even as a student with almost no income!
• Led to more stress!

This particular quarter is also when I learned how to use feelings of franticness & fear, lack of sleep, and too many stimulants to trigger an adrenaline rush. This would grant a strong jolt of energy and focus to push through. This is not a healthy tactic. I do not recommend becoming an adrenaline junkie as a way to boost energy. It carries a heavy physical toll over time. (I'll address more another time.)

RELATED: TBD - College Story

Paying accounts

Like overuse of credit cards, it comes to a point where accounts need to be paid. To get out of time debt, you have to start clearing and reducing commitments. You’ve overbooked yourself and need to resolve anything significant that you have been deferring.

It may take a difficult (and highly planned) discussion with your boss or your team to ensure priorities are adequately resourced and to align on what can be slowed or placed on hold if additional resources can’t be found. (I can see you cringing at the thought of this conversation…)

Remember, getting out of time debt is not a sign of weakness! Do not make this about you and your performance, but focus on the goals of the team. If you handle the discussion appropriately and keep it focused on BIG picture, stakeholders will respect your courage and responsibility to speak up about how priorities are at risk due to a lack of resources.

Prioritizing more deeply, planning your schedule more thoroughly, and gating commitments are three tactics to help you going forward. In this article, I’ll address gating commitments, follow the links for more information on the other tactics.

The Bible also calls for us to let no debt remain outstanding in Romans 13:8. In this chapter, Paul is transitioning from talking about discussing what is owed to human authorities to talking about what is owed to fellow Christians. Fulfilling time debts addresses both. How does clearing time debts and asking for forgiveness to those whom you hurt (including yourself) show your love?

Are You Willing to Experiment for Yourself?

"Ugh .. this is a mess. I can't figure out how to get out of these commitments - people will be hurt or disappointed. It will reflect poorly on me."

Let's walk through this. Getting back to the thought at the beginning - whatever you do is the highest priority. That is your decision and choice. Anything cancelled or incomplete you decided was secondary. There is no procrastination, just priority decisions.

• Review the last week, have the activities that you completed (versus the ones you cancelled) reflect what you view as most important?
• What messages did you send to people that you skipped out on?
• What will happen if you continue to go into time debt? 
• What happens if you clean up your schedule and you stop breaking your word?

Only you have the power to make different decisions of how to use your time. This may be a series of difficult conversations, but don't you think people would rather you were transparent that you might not be able to do something? Or how an alternative might occur? Is that better long term for your relationships or randomly and without notice cancelling or underdelivering without informing them?

Also, you never know what can happen in that discussion. There was one woman I spoke to, her kids were relieved to get out of some of the afterschool activities that she and her husband had pushed them into. They didn't have to constantly juggle carpools and pickups any more.

I get it - there are things you can't get out of immediately. You may not be able to change your schedule this week, but you can start the discussions and slowly get yourself to a more manageable load. As you stop having to cancel or half do activities, how will you benefit?

RELATED: Setting Effective Boundaries with Narrow Gates

My hope for you...

With practice and training, implementing strategies to manage work-related stress and prioritize your time will become easier. Not worrying how to balance out the hours in the day and which activities to cut out, you will feel reduced stress and a happier work-life harmony. By taking time for relationships and activities that nourish your body, mind, and spirit, you will be living more of the life that God intends for you.

Remember, God is always present, and by surrendering to Him and allowing the Holy Spirit to guide you, you'll find the strength and courage to overcome challenges and grow, ultimately leading to a flourishing life.

Interested in this approach and want to learn more about how you can go deeper into using your existing time management skills to help you improve your work-life harmony and reducing your stress?  Book a free consultation.

Planning & Scheduling At Work

Planning

Outside of project planning, a lot of people skip the step of daily or weekly planning that occurs between prioritizing and scheduling. Planning is a key step to make sure that you are clear on the actions and time required to ensure your priorities are delivered. Without planning or organizing your day in advance, it is easy to lose too much time and energy to lower priority activities or to always be firefighting the next crisis. Time blocking is a great technique if you need to adopt a planning step. 

Planning Priorities

High level, time blocking is when you take your top priorities and design each day around those. Break each day into 2-4 hour blocks, assigning priorities to each block. Break your priorities into actionable tasks. Dedicate your most energized, focused and least distracted blocks of time for tasks associated with your top priorities. Then as you schedule, you fill in around those activities. Some people find that time blocking can also effectively replace or simplify to-do lists and other task management.

Proactive Organization

Taking a few minutes every day to organize and plan for the next day is also one of the keys to success that I've seen people give you as they try to make time for other activities. In reality, they just make themselves more ineffective. Scrambling to prepare. Being late or missing to the super early meeting someone added to your calendar, instead of communicating your lack of availability and an alternate suggestion to connect. You don't want organizing for tomorrow to be the last minutes of your day as you are trying to get ready to go home or start your evening (if you work from home). There may be something that you forgot or that was added as a priority for tomorrow that takes time to prepare. Do it around lunch time or mid-afternoon, so you have time to adjust or take action.

Scheduling

A common progression of scheduling that I've seen people use is -

• Keeping personal and work calendars separate. Work calendar is just to handle meeting scheduling.
• As work gets more complex, task functions or to-do lists may get adopted.
• As work gets more meetings, time blocks have to be put in for focused work. These may or may not be honored if someone double books. Major personal activities are added to work calendar.
• As meetings continue to proliferate, you leave the double and triple bookings (just answering "Tentative" instead of "Decline" to the meetings you can't attend) so you have reminders of where to follow up. At this point, you may give up on a personal calendar and put everything into the work one so you can see everything. 

At some point you find that you are scheduled from shortly after waking until a few hours before bed. As you look at your days, you wonder how on earth can you get your personal work done and attend to your personal life. You feel like the calendar is driving your day instead of your priorities.

What are your personal prioritizing, planning and scheduling practices? Are you designing your day or are you allowing everyone with access to your calendar to design your day? With as little sleep as you are getting, does it feel like you are literally scheduling 1440 minutes of your day?

The greatest challenge is not holding firm to when your day starts and ends and how to handle double or triple booking. The more proactive you are with daily planning and organizing, the less likely you will have an untenable situation.

RELATED: Addressing Common Gaps in Prioritization 

Leveraging Planning & Scheduling Tools for Creating Greater Work-Life Balance

As your day gets booked to the point that you are longing for a 25th (or 26th) hour in the day, you need to make some adjustments in how you plan and schedule. As you've noticed for yourself, something needs to change. It seems like the more structure and control that you add into your calendar the more your day diverts from your plan.

As you get to this level of busy-ness it is even more important to ensure that your calendar has flexibility and you more clearly define the priorities of the day. It seems paradoxical, but if you allow for space in your day for unplanned activities you will have a higher completion rate of your planned priority activities. Think about your commute - you probably do this already. You know that a typical worst case travel day is versus if you had good traffic. You have already adjusted for the variability as you plan your day. Without that buffer, you would frequently be late. With that buffer, you are usually on-time and viewed as dependable & reliable at work.

Time Boxing

One way to ensure that you have scheduled enough time for key activities is time boxing. Estimate the reasonably likely amount of time needed to complete a task and put it in your calendar. This is good for repeatable events / tasks, ones that you know that you need to make steady progress across multiple days and other tasks that you can make a pretty good prediction on duration.

Going back to the example of the commute. On a good day, your 15 mile commute takes 20 minutes, whereas bad days can take up to an hour. While you have more good than bad commuting days, using 20 minutes in your schedule does not give you flexibility and blocking an hour every day feels like overkill on your schedule. Since 80% - 90% of the time you can get to work in 35 minutes, that is a reasonably likely timeframe to use in your schedule. I'm sure you won't complain if you get a few extra minutes to talk to people as you arrive or check a few emails before the first scheduled task.

One of the most common activities in your schedule are meetings. There is a different tactic you can take to build in flexibility.

Pomodoro (A tomato sauce for my pasta?)

If you are time management geek, you have probably heard of or applied the Pomodoro Technique. This is usually the first occasion people hear about time cushions. This technique is about scheduling only 25 minutes of every 30 minutes. This gives you a moment between activities or meetings for short breaks or to get a quick task done. Most commonly people start with the meetings that they schedule - book for 30 minutes in calendar but set the agenda and run the meeting to ensure that you always end early. Alternatively, let everyone know that you will start 5 minutes later, giving people time to squeeze something in or connect with each other before starting the meeting. If you are just looking to find more time for breaks, email and other quick tasks so that you are not playing catch up at night, Pomodoro is probably sufficient.

Larger Time Cushions for Unplanned Urgent Issues

I find that as demands on your time increase, 5 to 10 minute windows does not provide enough flexibility for unplanned issues. It may be more effective for you to look at time cushions. These are unplanned blocks of time in your day that are not dedicated to priorities. They provide flexibility for you to take action on any unplanned urgent issue that arose through the day. If nothing pops up, you can use the time for other activities. Keep in mind that to be able to use these for unplanned issues - you have to make sure that these time windows are not needed to complete the top priorities of the day and you have to protect them from other people scheduling into them.

Here are two suggestions on how to include time cushions in your day. 

• Include 30 minutes time cushions every few hours. This is great if your most significant disruptions are communication or administrative tasks. It provides defined time to catch up on people that stop by, emails or calls or to cascade information to your team. This approach also works when you are frequently requested to do small tasks or provide information with 24 hour turn around. Based on your meetings and activities, you can move these around to different times of day.
• Based on the pattern of requests, sometimes 30 minute time blocks is not enough to deal with the types of urgent issues you have to deal with. In this case, larger 1-2 hour blocks in mid-afternoon may work better. Set a time for these, before you do planning for the next day and to provide sufficient time in the day for anyone that may need to respond to you. 

Planning, Organizing & Boundaries

The secret to finding a reasonable amount of time for planned activities and flexibility on a daily basis is prioritizing and holding boundaries. You have to effectively plan ahead and not let everyone determine your schedule. I can't emphasize enough that you may have to dig deeper into distinguishing between what has to be done and what you'd like to get done. You also have to be assertive and decisive on how you are handling double and triple booking on your time.

Boundaries I'll talk about more in a future blog. For now, know that you need to be clear on how you are containing work from your personal life. Is it okay for certain unplanned activities at work to takeaway from your time at home? If not, you need to protect that time and start building skills on how to handle requests that encroach on your personal time. Sometimes countering with an alternate delivery time is enough. Other times a more in depth resourcing or prioritization discussion with your upline may be needed so he/she can be aligned with how you and the team are making the time for the new commitment.

Mix & Match

Mixing and matching different size time cushions and time blocks, you will be able to find the right balance between planned priorities, breaks, and unplanned urgent issues in your day. This is an active balance - different periods in your personal life and career will need different approaches based on how much flexibility your life requires. These unplanned issues and delays are so often what puts the pressure on where you feel there is not enough time in the day to get everything done. They are a chronic source of stress when not addressed.

Are You Willing to Experiment for Yourself?

Objections

"Ugh .. I am in such a hole I don't think I can even make the time to clean up my schedule."

This means that you will stay on this hamster wheel of exhaustion and not having enough time in the day for when "stuff happens." An easy first step is to stop allowing your calendar tool to auto-accept meetings. Also, you can decide and prepare yourself to run meetings more tightly, so you can get 5-10 minutes for yourself to tackle next week's schedule. In time, you will feel more agile and able to handle more of what your day throws at you. 

Benefits

I get it - there are still only so many hours in the day and a limit to what you can do. You may not be able to change your schedule this week, but you can pick a date in the future and start putting in repeating time cushions or time blocks in your schedule. It will start changing how your calendar appears to others so you can start building in greater flexibility. You can slowly decide to make modifications to your current routines and workflows so you can also easily incorporate into your existing workflows. 

RELATED: TBD - Boundaries

My hope for you...

Over time, implementing strategies to manage stress and prioritize your time will become easier and more natural. This will lead to a greater sense of control, reduced stress, and a healthier work-life balance. By taking time for activities that nourish your body, mind, spirit, and relationships, you will experience greater fulfillment and satisfaction.

Remember, God is always with you, and by surrendering to Him and allowing the Holy Spirit to guide you, you will find the strength and courage to make difficult decisions and overcome challenges, ultimately leading to personal growth and flourishing.

Interested in this approach and want to learn more about how you can go deeper into using your existing time management skills to help you improve your work-life harmony and reducing your stress?  Book a free consultation.