Let’s begin by looking backwards. On Sept. 16, Mara and I released an episode on three things you should be doing now to care for yourself. Mara took the lead on that one as we dove into designing your morning, clarifying your identity and mission, and building a sustainable habit of creating you time. As an aside, I’m still enamored with the idea of creating a “third space” in which you can be yourself, without trying to be something for everyone else, and a shoutout to listener and daily email reader Penny Connor for that concept.
Last week I did an episode on transitioning from work to home in ways that will make it easier to leave school at school. The three key components were investing time in reflection before walking out of school, listening to personal things (like music or audio books) on your commute home, and having specific practices when you walk in the door to home that signal your body to shift into home mode.
I acknowledged then that many of you do have duties that require you to work from home and that we would dive into that today, but before we go there…

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Show Intro

Celebrations:

Fall: Leaves, great sleeping temperatures, and football

Key Points Part 1

The most significant barrier to turning off is when work intrudes into your home. This can happen for three primary reasons:

• You have a duty that specifically requires you to work from home
• There is a real emergency
• Your work is your life (the issues you work on are the issues you live with)
• You view yourself as a martyr

Let’s look at some general habits for when you MUST work from home and then address each of the other circumstances.

1. Limit who can contact you at home. If you have a work phone, shut it down and allow your boss/important person to reach you via your home phone. Or program your phone to only allow certain people to reach you at certain times (Hint: iPhone’s Short Cuts feature is super helpful). 

1. Create (and enforce) strict boundaries about what duties are and are not off-limits for being interrupted at home and communicate those to people. If you are in charge of getting subs, control how people reach you and when you will check email. You can also do something like add all your teachers to your favorites and set your email to put all messages from favorites into a special folder. This way, when you open your computer to check email, you only need to look at the favorites folder so you aren’t getting sucked into other things. The technology has made it harder to be away from work, but we can also use it to flip the script. 

1. Designate a location you go to when you must do work at home, whether that is phone calls, email, or something else. Maintaining physical separation from your normal living areas when you are working is critical! Bonus: make your home workspace uncomfortable so you won’t be tempted to spend extra time there. Closet anyone? 🤣

Going back to one of the questions I asked you last week: what happens if you are unavailable for six weeks? The school will keep functioning, even though some of the “critical” things you always did may not get done. Maybe they weren’t so critical after all?

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Key Points Part 2

Three special situations:

• There is a real emergency
• Your work is your life (the issues you work on are the issues you live with)
• You view yourself as a martyr

Emergencies

• Create your boundaries and build friction to make it harder for people to contact you – unless it is regarding a very specific situation your team has already determined needs to go to you (fire in the building, death of staff or student). (hard talk: if your narrative is “I need to be there for my people” what does that say about how much you value your family?)
• Have a clear funnel of who contacts you after hours and what constitutes an emergency
• If there are always emergencies then confront the hard truth about what this job is going to do to you and then make a decision.

Your work is your life (eg addiction counselor in recovery, family of educators, a close family member is undocumented)

• Out of my expertise, but need to acknowledge
• Community, community, community?
• Stealing minutes for me, for indulgence

You view yourself as a martyr

• You may be a martyr if…
  • You think your school will fall apart without you (it won’t)
  • You cannot possibly do less than your best work, even on tasks that don’t deserve it
  • You must respond to everything before you can end the day
  • After 3:30, you spend more time thinking about work than you do about the people you love
• There are a lot of cultural elements in education that push us towards martyr syndrome, but whether or not you walk through the door is up to you.

Summarizing (The big takeaway)

• The key is boundaries
  • Who
  • What
  • When
• Use technology
• Create an uncomfortable home office
• Don’t be a martyr (by definition, martyrs don’t survive)

Special thanks to my amazing son-in-law Ranford Almond for the...