So, boundaries, or maybe that elusive thing called “work-life balance.” Does anyone really have it? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth working toward. It’s also important to remember that balance requires motion.
Think about riding a bike; you cannot maintain balance without forward momentum. Even yoga, which a lot of people associate with balance, is about movement and about constant corrections. What works for you now in terms of life balance might need adjusting in a few weeks or months, and that is a good thing.
For us one of the balance shifts was the first Christmas Replay was open. We’d been open since May, and like I mentioned in my first post Cassidy had been primarily working the store on his own. Well, come late December 2018, he went down for a week and a half with influenza and probably pneumonia. Suddenly, I was thrown into running the store single-handedly. We had to shift the balance after that so that he got more rest and downtime and so that I knew how to run this place a little more.
Shutting down for three months this spring was another balance shift. I’m sure there will be more coming down the road. That’s how life goes.
Boundaries are kind of a big topic and different people/situations have different needs. While I am mostly going to talk about figuring out boundaries in our situation as a married couple running a start-up, I think a lot of this could apply to this COVID-19 world where so many people are suddenly working from home.
When you work with your spouse it can be really hard to draw a line between work and home. Even more if you are running a start-up or a small business. For the early years of our marriage, I watched my in-laws, Cassidy’s parents, run their towing business together. Cassidy actually worked for them for those 8 years. Based on their experience and my own, I’m going to tell you that it is impossible to draw a hard and fast boundary between work and home.
For example, we actually have a lot of our brainstorming sessions and week planning discussions while on our daily family dog walk.
That works for us. What doesn’t work for us is talking about work after 8pm. My brain is basically done for the day at that point. (If you see me closing at Replay, just know I’m not at my full potential and don’t ask me hard questions.) We learned that the hard way, because Cassidy is 100% a night owl and he would often come home and have things to share or discuss at 10pm or midnight. The results from these discussions were one of three things: 1) I didn’t remember what we talked about the next day, 2) I had no useful solutions to offer and just got frustrated, or 3) I wasn’t able to sleep well because my brain kept trying to deal with the problem.
Sometimes we also preface a subject change with, “This is a work thing,” or “This is a home thing.” Just putting a simple heading on what we need to say helps the other person switch gears and follow the conversation. The reality is that we do need to talk about work things at home and home things at work. If you’ve been in to the store, you know that while working we are also raising a child. Parenting doesn’t stop when the store opens.
The other phrase we say to each other is: “Do we need to deal with this now? Or do we need to write it down and come back to it?” Especially on the weekends.
Our weekends are Sunday-Monday and we really try not to spend that time being at or talking about work. Sometimes it is necessary, but we have to agree on it. It also really helps to plan for that ahead of time. The days that we do a deep cleaning are often a weekend, for example, but we schedule those in advance and we both know that it’s coming. Or there are times that we have a party on Tuesday and need to spend some of the weekend preparing.
We have discovered though that we need to be more aggressive in guarding those days off. Running a small business is exhausting. It is not for the faint of heart. When we spend too much of our time on the weekend thinking and talking about and working at Replay, we are not ready for the actual work week to begin. And the other consequence is that the lawn doesn’t get mowed, the dishes and laundry continue to pile up, and we get to a feeling of not liking each other very much.
I’m grateful to work everyday with my husband. It allows us a lot more family time together than we would otherwise. And it helps us use our skills to be a team. Despite the challenges and hard discussions, it’s worth it. But those fluid boundaries and that movement-based balance are core requirements for maintaining what we’ve got going in business and in life.
