Before I was self-employed, I’d often end my work day by making a list of tasks that needed to get done the next day… or at least a starter list of priorities. Then, the next day when I arrived at my desk, I could look at my list and jump right in. The other benefit, besides the obvious satisfaction one gets from crossing things off of a list, is that it helped me more easily let go of those, often burning, tasks until the next day. 

My evenings were unburdened by a lingering carousel of thoughts about all that was yet unfinished. There were boundaries and the work stayed at work. Even when I began working remotely full time in 2018, I still had a desk at my house and employed the same practice. It was healthy. 

At times I forgot about doing this and can say for certainty that those were the times when work became unhealthy. The boundaries blurred and, because it is in my nature to give whatever I am doing my all, I lost work-life balance. 

The end of 2016 and into 2017 was a long stretch where I buried myself so deep in my work that I became unhealthy… mentally, physically, emotionally. That ended when I made the decision to quit my job, take a six month sabbatical, and get my mind right. I was committed to finding my way back to a better balance and, once I did, find a new job that I could work more on my own terms. Part of which was working remotely 100% of the time. 

So when the pandemic hit in 2020 that part of my life didn’t change much. Which was good because just about everything else in my life had changed—relationships, marriage, moving, my daughter graduating high school, and me getting a masters degree. Not to mention the pandemic and the ensuing isolation. Needless to say, it was a lot of transition. 

I had arrived at “healthy” but in all the transition, dropped many of the practices that helped me get there. One among them was end-of-the-workday list making. Everyone in isolation seemed to have lost all the boundaries set by the 8 hour workday. We were all home and therefore always at our desks with the capacity to continue working well past “5 o’clock.” People were checking and responding to email at all hours. 

It didn’t help I worked on a bunch of west coast based projects with late hours and ambitious people, who thrived on work. I recognized the patterns of bad behavior in myself a lot faster than I previously had. Wisened, I suppose, by experience. So I quit, and became my own boss. 

Now, one would think that being one’s own boss would make it easy to set the hours and workload as needed, but what’s the saying?… you can take the girl out of the workaholic environment but you can’t take the workaholic out of the girl. So I’m still… STILL struggling with the same old, same old issues with boundaries. 

All of this to say that I’ve decided that even though I work from home AND am my own boss, I’m reinstating the end-of-the-workday list. And going to fight like hell to let all the shit go at 4pm. I need to try to regain balance. 

It will for sure make me take a hard look at where I’m spending my time and what the priorities are. I need to think about what tasks I can sacrifice or maybe just scale back on. And then I need to reward myself with doing things I actually enjoy instead. 

I think that last one is key. Maybe the other list I need to make is the list of things I enjoy doing. Cuz all work and no play makes Miss SugarCookie a dull Cookie. And nobody likes a dull cookie—cookies gotta have flavor! 😂.

Ok. Times up. Wish me luck. 

Peace and love, 

~Miss SugarCookie