There is a popular The American story of a Dutch boy who saved an entire ocean by sticking his finger into a leaky levee and just… standing there. This act, basically no one in the Netherlands had ever heard of, is said to have saved a country from being submerged in water. It is, of course, fiction and a particular American genre. In fact, as the Dutch know well, individuals cannot constrain the ocean – only infrastructure can.
Speaking of which, if you live in the US, chances are that work is taking over more and more of your life. Whether it’s replying to emails in the middle of the night, working just over five and a half hours a day, or checking Slack while watching Netflix “just in case,” work can easily overwhelm every nook and cranny of your schedule.
You can try to quit, cold turkey, but we both know that won’t work. The ocean constantly threatens to inundate you, and there’s no way you’ll stick your finger in the dike to hold it back — you need infrastructure.
Ideally, this would be a company culture that refuses to work overtime or a law that forbids working when you’re not being paid for it (this is a law the Dutch are exploring.) However, what if no, you can set the software you use to better respect your time. Here’s how to do it.
Turn off Work apps from your personal device
Some people need to update their work messages outside of business hours and get paid accordingly. If you are not one of those people and updating such messages is not part of your job description, you should stop.
It’s easy, when there’s a notification, you can quickly reply to it and then reply to something else while still in the app and wow how an hour has passed, I’m going for a walk tonight, oh no. The easiest way to stop this cycle is to not see any messages in the first place. The easiest way to do that is to not have those apps on the devices you watch outside of business hours.
Team chat apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams are obvious candidates here, as are your corporate email accounts. Uninstall those apps from your phone, tablet and personal computer. Only view those apps on a job-provided machine during business hours.
Even better: Spend your leisure time off devices entirely or, if not, across devices can not run the working tools. I’m a huge fan of e-readers and game consoles for this very reason precisely because of all they can do. Spending more time on those and less on the kind of rectangles that can drag you into work.
Use different accounts for work and personal use
Of course, there are reasons you might want the to-do app on your personal device. Some jobs don’t provide work equipment, and some people can’t afford to have multiple devices just to keep work and the rest of their lives separate. However, there are still steps you can take. Here are a few ideas.
- Configure Work and Play on your computer. Both Windows and macOS allow you to create multiple user accounts, as anyone who grew up with a sibling with one computer can recall. Dig into those settings carefully (here for Windowsand here for macOS) and create separate accounts for work and play, keeping hobbies and personal things in one account, and other things at work. This can make a computer like two different devices and also has the benefit of reducing distractions during work hours.
- Use different browsers for work and play. Most to-do apps these days are in the browser, so consider only switching browsers when you’ve finished your day’s work. For example, I like to use Safari on my Mac for personal work and Chrome for my work. You can use a combination of different browsers or you can just use Chrome’s profile feature in the same way.
