Boundaries, with Helen Wright – TPW269

London-based banking professional Helen Wright sets intentional boundaries between work, personal, and family commitments.

Intentional boundaries make multiple roles work

Helen Wright is a Risk and Assurance manager for a large European bank based in London, managing a team of 7 distributed across the UK. She lives in North London with her husband and twin boys and works as flexibly as possible to maintain as much of a happy work-life balance as can be achieved with toddlers.

A typical day

Helen has more of a typical week than a typical day, due to her flexible working arrangements. Some days, she works in the office, and other days she works from home. Some days, she is not working, but available, and other days she is not working at all.

She has an arrangement with her company that lets her determine when she works as long as she works 28 hours a week and meets her professional objectives. She tries to work around the times that match her childcare arrangements, which she has on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so she gets the majority of her productive work done in those days. On Mondays and Fridays, she is with her boys and gets a bit of work, such as email, planning, and professional reading, done in the evenings.

Monday evenings are allocated to planning. She knows if she doesn't do this, her entire week can get derailed, so it is a high-priority task for her.

On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, she commutes to her office in London.

On Thursdays, Helen works from home, so she tries to fit in a run or at least a walk outside and get some fresh air.

On the mornings of commuting days, her husband gets the children ready and drops them off at childcare, so she gets herself ready and goes off to work. This allows her to get an early start to work, and consequently, get off work early so she can pick the boys up in the evening. This arrangement has worked well for them.

She listens to business-related podcasts on her hour-long commute to switch her brain into work mode.

In the evening, she has a personal playlist of podcasts covering topics such as current affairs and comedy. Some podcasts she recommends are The Squiggly Careers Podcast and Leaders with Babies.

On Fridays, Helen has her boys again, but she lets her colleagues know that she's available on Whatsapp if they need her urgently to review an email or read a paper or jump on a quick call.

On Saturdays and Sundays, she and her husband both keep their phone off and commit to family time.

Biggest productivity challenges

Helen's flexible work arrangement comes with a set of challenges.

First, setting clear boundaries takes purposeful persistence. When Helen first went back to work after her maternity leave, she struggled with guilt from working flexibly. For example, if someone scheduled a meeting with her on days she didn't work, she would apologize for not being available and explain why. However, she has learned not to apologize anymore. Instead, she simply tells them that time doesn't work for her and provides alternative times that do.

Working flexibly also requires delegating, which Helen isn't naturally good at, but having a good team comprised of people she trusts is a great help. Helen says you have to trust the people on your team. They need to know when they need to come to you for decisions, but they also need to feel empowered to make decisions for themselves as well, so getting that balance right can also be a challenge.