how do you protect your personal time?
Recently in South Korea the government has been calling for an increase to the working week from its current 52 hours to 69 hours a week. Their laws allow for a standard 40-hour week, plus 12 hours of overtime. The proposal is to increase this to 29 hours of allowable overtime per week.
The proponents of this plan claim it will help to address the country’s falling birth rates by allowing more ‘flexibility’ in working arrangements. On the face of it, it’s hard to see how working almost 10 hours a day, seven days a week, would help to escalate the birth rate. The opposition party has opposed the plan, claiming that the proposal would be a ‘shortcut to population extinction.’
Meanwhile, in Australia, and in other countries around the world, a four-day work week is becoming more popular, with data from companies who’ve tried it showing that reducing total working hours, with an extra day off each week, actually increases the company’s performance and makes for a happier and less stressful workplace.
Regardless of what your official hours might be, creating and maintaining appropriate boundaries around your time and space is vital to keeping happiness levels up, stress levels down and maintaining healthy relationships at work and at home.
With the increased acceptance of remote and hybrid working, there’s a risk that the boundaries between work time and personal time will continue to blur. Some countries are addressing this already, such as in France, where the ‘right to disconnect’ has been legislated since 2017. This ensures that employees can switch off from technology after working hours and are not required to respond to work emails or other contact outside of the agreed timeframes.
But we don’t need to wait for legislation to be introduced to set appropriate boundaries for ourselves. If we don't have firm boundaries to protect our personal space and time from the demands of work, this can deplete our energy levels over the long-term. To avoid the risk of burnout, compromised work performance and chronic health issues, we need to value our own time and set and maintain healthy boundaries between work and our personal lives.
For the leaders that I work with, setting and maintaining boundaries is one of the most common challenges they face. While this once may have been more predominant in the most senior level positions, or in sectors where there is a high level of immediate demand, I am now seeing this very commonly across all sectors and in all role types.
One of the simplest things you can do to establish healthy boundaries is to track how you spend you time over a short period, for example - two weeks.
There are plenty of apps that you can use for this. One that I’ve used is Eternity, but there are many others. You can also just use a simple piece of paper, a notation in your paper diary, colour coding of your electronic calendar, or if you prefer, an Excel spreadsheet, can all be used to track how you spend your time over a sample period.
Three simple categories are all you need:
1. Work time
2. Personal time
3. Sleep
You can of course refine this as much as you like but simply tracking these three things over a two-week period will give you a pretty clear picture of here your boundaries lie. To make it easy for you, I’ve created a simple Boundaries Tracker that you can download here and record how you spend your time each day.
If you’re not happy with how the picture looks, it’s time to make some changes.
Protecting our personal time is just one aspect of how we manage our energy and support ourselves to do our best work. If you’d like some tips on how you can improve this for yourself, I’ve put together a short assessment to help you determine the areas where you might need to make changes.
My Personal Energy Scorecard is free and takes less than two minutes to complete. It will give you an indicator of how you’re going and some easy tips you can implement now to boost and sustain your energy levels.
You can take the scorecard here:
