Tactics to Hold Your Boundaries

In response to last week’s Monday Musing, a friend asked for thoughts about this scenario: 

“When I talk to my busy MBA friends, they almost always acknowledge the importance of thinking / reflection time, and some even schedule it into their calendars. The issue for those people is that they then don't hold the calendar'd space as sacred—i.e., they will cancel it as other meetings arise. They will tell you they know that they are sacrificing the important for the urgent, and that they shouldn't, but they still do it. (And yet they will absolutely never schedule over [insert something they explicitly say is less important than the thinking / reflection time].)”

At root, this is a question about how to maintain boundaries and how to follow through on intentions. While the specific scenario is about holding reflection time, it could just as well be about our heads-down work blocks, family time, self-care time, gym time, reading, or training time—really anything for which we want to make an investment, but that can easily get interrupted by more urgent tasks. I’ll call these “investment activities.”

Unfortunately, I’ve never read or heard of an easy solution to this challenge, but I have a few thoughts here.

When I work with people who have this challenge with boundaries and follow through on intentions, I ask a question like this: If you had a doctor's appointment scheduled and your boss requested that you attend a meeting, would you still keep the appointment?

The answer for ~100% of people is, of course they’d keep the appointment. They would have no issues holding their boundaries in this scenario.

I start there just to show that it’s typically not an always/never dynamic. Rather, it’s usually about what things we believe are legitimate or important enough to sacrifice for, and to whom we’re willing to say No.  

So what’s going on? What's the difference between the doctor’s appointment that we always keep and the commitments we violate?

Barriers

When I’ve seen people wrestle with this challenge, these are the issues that most often come up:

Avoiding the judgment of others: We often default to a Yes to the meeting request because we don’t want to risk others judging us to be unreliable or less committed to the team if we said No. Within that context, we keep the doctor’s appointment because we think it’s a “legitimate” excuse that everyone will understand. Hence, there’s less risk of negative judgments. 

Not wanting to let people down: We say Yes to the meeting request because we don’t want to let others down when they need us. The doctor’s appointment is easier to keep because we’ve already made a commitment there (and likely affirmed it to a human being the day before). And flaking on an existing commitment is worse than saying No to a new request. 

Not having clarity or strong belief in our success algorithm: We all carry beliefs about the “return” on investment activities, and when that belief is strong, we’re more likely to stick to it. In the case of the doctor’s appointment, we have a clear view of the return from the investment. On the other hand, when we violate our investment time, it often reflects that we really don’t see that investment as core to our success, or that we don’t feel it strongly enough to sacrifice for it.

Potential Reframes

Given that we have those kinds of psychological barriers to holding time for our investment activities, what are the kinds of mindset shifts that can help us? Some ideas:

What’s driving my belief that I need to give any justification? What is wrong with just, "I have another commitment?"

By scrutinizing and then editing our beliefs about what’s required in terms of a “legitimate” excuse or how much people will care (i.e., they might just accept the explanation of a pre-existing commitment without probing further), that can open up space to hold firmer to our intentions. This is a “I don’t care that much about what you think of me” mindset, which is helpful when our reasons for saying No are personal or potentially less acceptable to others. 

Saying No to myself is just as bad as saying No to someone else.

When we’ve scheduled investment time, it’s a commitment to ourselves. The trick, then, is to bring as much integrity toward our commitments to ourselves as we bring to commitments to others. Fundamentally, this is a “my needs are worthwhile” mindset.

Recovery is not a selfish, indulgent pursuit that takes away from performance. Rather, it’s what it takes to perform.

Soccer legend Megan Rapinoe voiced a great example of this on an episode of Recode Decode. She said this of her training routine: “At least two, two-and-a-half hours a day with sort of prehab, rehab, the training, all of that. And then the recovery piece, obviously. We call naps and massages work. So it’s part of my normal daily job.” [Emphasis added] 

Perhaps, then, making our investment activities an explicit part of our algorithm for success would help us keep them higher on our radars. 

I’m someone who plays the long game.

But once we’ve made our belief concrete, we probably need to have more faith in the long-run return to avoid making suboptimal short-term tradeoffs. 

Shane Parrish, an author and thought leader, wrote this on Twitter last week: “Ninety percent of success can be boiled down to consistently doing the obvious thing for an uncommonly long period of time without convincing yourself that you're smarter than you are.”

By declaring that we’re someone who plays the long game, we can signal to ourselves that we truly believe in the potential return from our investment activities. Writing down that declared identity can also boost our faith. Hopefully, that can help us stand firm against pressures to fold on our boundaries and intentions.

Tactical Helpers

Mindset shifts can be helpful, but they aren’t overnight solutions. Here are some tactics that I’ve seen people try as a way to hold fast to their intentions. 

Go beyond a Yes/No response to a request that would violate a boundary or overwrite investment time. 

Instead, your responses might sound like: 

• I can't make the meeting at that time, but what do you need from me? How can I deliver that another way? 

• I can’t make it then, but if you need me, here are some times when I can make it.

The underlying strategy in those types of responses is to communicate your positive intent. It’s not a No, it’s a “yes, but not right now” or “yes, but not in the exact way you’re imagining that I’ll fulfill that request.” By signaling a Yes, we can rightfully avoid the negative judgments of a No.

Make investment time a commitment to someone else.

Rather than trying to override our instinct to avoid letting people down, we can leverage that feeling by including others in our investment activities. It’s easier to not flake when we’re going to do that activity with another person. We don’t like failing commitments, so make it more of a commitment! 

At minimum, it’ll give an easier excuse if you need it. “I can’t make it; I have a meeting!”

At some level, it’s hard to hold any intention faithfully because of the natural chaos of our calendars. There will always be movement. These tactics can help:  

Make the investment activity a task for the week, not for a specific time and day.

Put another way, give yourself multiple opportunities to achieve the intention, even if you have to move it.

As an example, I have a monthly strategy reflection on my calendar. However, I rarely use the exact time I’ve scheduled, because at the start of that week, I write “strategy reflection” on my weekly to-do list (usually at the #1 position) and open the Google Doc for it. By taking those actions, the reflection mindset is activated, and I start taking notes. By the time the calendar space arrives, most of the work is already done! In that sense, the appointment becomes a reminder rather than just a fixed opportunity to do it.

Create slack! 

I wrote a few weeks ago about the strategic benefit of having slack. But one of the main reasons I’ve seen people have to schedule over their investment activities is that, when they need to add something new, there’s no room in their calendar other than the time they’ve blocked off. The solution is to block off time for the uncertain—especially reserving time to handle the urgent without it having to come at the expense of the important.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you’ve tried to tackle these challenges!