Tech is great for helping create connection with prospective clients, for making ourselves accessible to current clients, and for time- and space-shifting our workspace for greater flexibility. I can travel anywhere, be in any office with any phone, and clients with my office phone number can reach me without having to hunt me down. I can check email and edit documents from anywhere I can get my hands on a computer, a web-enabled phone, or an Internet connection. I can fax and print and scan—and receive the same—without all of the equipment I used to need to pull off those tasks. I can hire an assistant who lives half a country away and work with her almost as though she’s in the next office. All well and good.

You could just hear the “but” coming, couldn’t you?

The trouble is, there’s a time I want the world to go away for a bit so I can relax, spend time with my loved ones, and unwind. How to balance the demands of a thriving ADR practice, the desire to be accessible to clients, the tendency toward Type A, and the need to have a life? In Turning Off the Computer: The Necessity of Boundaries for the Self-Employed Mediator & Applying What We Learn to Mediation, Pronoia Mediation‘s Laura Noah muses about some of these very questions.

“I love being self-employed. However, it’s also more true than not that those of us who are self-employed are always working (or can be, should be, need to be … yikes!). I think individuals who aren’t self-employed have this fantasy that those of us who are self-employed spend all of our time kicking-back at the beach or attempting to write the Great American Novel between client appointments. I could choose to spend my time that way, sure, but the reality is that unless you have lots of money at your disposal, the pressure to be working is a constant, particularly in the early stages of owning a business. Boundaries are an endless struggle.”

Laura invites fellow mediators and other small business owners to share their strategies for creating balance and boundaries in The Age of Blackberry. I cut my professional teeth in higher education, where 70-hour work weeks weren’t unusual for deans like me, so it’s incredibly easy for me to slide back into that twisted norm. I have to work on this balance thing all the time. Here’s what I do at present, using tech to help keep me honest with myself:

• I set my business phone to go automatically to voicemail at 5 pm each day by changing my GrandCentral settings.
• I use Google Calendar to manage my personal calendar and business calendars, which I can overlay on each other, along with my husband’s schedule, to set aside vacation and other down time.
• Since I have wireless at home, it’s easy to get trapped into, “Let me just check email quickly” after dinner. I’m terrible about this…two hours later my husband will say, “Earth to Tammy, Earth to Tammy.” So I use a little pop-up reminder on my computer, also via a Google Calendar function, which dings at 8 pm and orders me to get a life. It’s pathetic, I know, but it works.
• I use Google Reader to scan blogs and other daily news quickly and efficiently, so I can keep up with news that affects my business without becoming a slave to it.
• I never give out my home number to clients. Well, almost never. For organizational clients who’ve been good to me and who have leaders with good boundaries of their own, I’ll offer it after the relationship is fully developed. Not one has ever misused it.
• And I have a large Newfoundland mix, Hugo, who stands in front of me, stares at me unblinkingly and with a very doleful expression, and then bites down repeatedly on his squeaky toy until I get the message it’s time to play. I’d swear he has a watch of his own.

What do you do to unplug and unwind? I’d love to learn from you!

Copyright © 2007 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.
Photo credit: eyebiz