There are many positives to working from home. My commute has been transformed to walking down the stairs to my desk instead of a 20 min drive. Some of the other changes have blurred the division between work and life. The time that you would have used for your commute, are you just starting work earlier? Normally, when connecting with your colleagues about a project, you may have talked about your weekend adventures beforehand, now with all communication between colleagues digitized (emails, texts or DMs), are you having moments of human-interaction that are not work related? Furthermore, instead of conversations happening during working hours, messages now come in at all hours. I've written a previous posts about decluttering your inbox and not perpetuating the problem by sending emails and replies during non-working hours. With all these digital conversation happening concurrently and at all hours, how do we quiet the noise? In this post, I have 4 suggestions that have helped me create clearer boundaries between work and life with the digital tools that I use. These strategies all start with examine my personal phone as that is the main battleground between my digital personal life and digital work life.
Be selective with your Apps
Just because there is an app available doesn't mean that you need to have it on your personal phone. The first step to creating digital boundaries is remove work apps from your device that you don't need to have access all the time. Many work teams use a chat program like Google Hangouts as a way to communicate quickly and it can be convenient to check your phone, but this is a gateway to have more noise in your life. If there is a comparable web-version of the app, I recommend accessing it that way. Open a window with your work email and the chat program as part of how you communicate. While you are working you are being responsive to the requests that are happening. After the work day, you've created a boundary on your personal device from these messages.
Use Separate Apps
When I was working to declutter my emails, I realized that having personal emails and work emails end up in the same mail app didn't help to create boundaries between my work and personal mail. There are some settings you can use to turn off notification for some mailboxes within an app, but I found when checking personal email, my eye would be caught with work emails. To have a clearer separation, I recommend using different mail apps entirely. The Gmail app is dedicated to my work email as my district is a Google for Education district. For my personal email accounts I use the mail app on my iPhone. Beyond using separate mail apps, I recommend using different browsers as well. Chrome is what I use for work while I use Safari for personal tasks. Bookmarks can be customized to each as well as maintaining your privacy.
Silence Work App Notifications
For each app that you do allow on your personal device, you get to set the notification for it. Everything doesn't need to have notification all over the place. Each of these notification is a future distraction from being intentional with your device use. For my work email on my personal device, I do allow notification, but only in one specific way as a badge. An alert with the number of new emails will show on my device. When a new email is received it doesn't alert me in any way. At the appropriate time, I use the number of new emails as a gauge to schedule in more or less time the next morning to process and respond to emails. Try adjusting the notification settings for you apps and see what makes sense. For some, I have notification centre turned on where I can get a quick digest of those apps all in one place.
Limit Work App Usage
In the settings of iPhones, you can click on Screen Time to get an analysis on the length of time you are using specific apps. If you are finding that you are using work apps outside of work hours you can do a couple of things to limit the app's usage. First you can create an App limit where you can set an amount of time an App is permitted to be used. Examining the screen time data can help you find a time that is realistic to help support limit its use. Second, you can schedule in downtime where only specific apps are allowed during a certain time period. For example, in the evening as you are winding down you may want to not allow work apps, but permit the use of wellness apps like AppleBooks or podcasts.
It is a constant battle to keep my digital worlds separate from each other, but I find there is a benefit to creating boundaries between the two. It helps to make time for your own interest and self-care. It puts things into perspective where that "work-crisis" isn't as catastrophic as it may seem. I am constantly trying out different settings and adjusting them as work and life are constantly changing themselves. There isn't one perfect way to do this, but being aware and purposeful with your digital tools is the first step. Thanks for reading! Please share in the comments any strategies you find helpful with your digital boundaries! Don't forget to subscribe and share if you found this helpful!
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