Personal time, home time, and family time seem to have gone the way of the rotary dial telephone. However, one of the best ways to start de-stressing your life is to establish some healthy boundaries and begin to experience true down time.
Two of the best new gadgets that have come out in the last few years are caller ID and voice mail. Most people already have these and if you don’t, I would suggest investing the few dollars it takes to add this service. Now the hard part of this is training the family and having the self discipline to actually begin setting house rules on private time.
Schedule time after work each day when you don’t answer the phone, pager, or e-mail. Better yet, put all devices on silent and let all calls go to voice mail for that time. Start with an hour during dinner and slowly expand that time to include most of the hours after work. Decide which calls automatically go to voice mail in the evenings if you do decide to leave the ringer on. Most everyone in my family knows not to answer work related calls for me after 5pm unless they ask first. (The call I got last evening at 8pm from my boss was answered by my dear hubby before he checked the caller ID. I would have let it go to voice mail.) If there is an urgent issue, the person can leave a voice mail and I can decide if it is an urgent matter for me. Remember someone else’s lack of planning does not make a matter your emergency!
For kids and teens, set ground rules for telephone conversations during dinnertime, homework time, and after a certain hour in the evenings. I don’t take kindly to folks calling my house after 9pm. It was considered rude when I was a kid and I still think it is rude today. Call me old fashioned if you must. I also don’t mind giving a free lesson in manners to any kid who calls my house after 9pm!!! It’s never too early to learn good habits.
I will be covering the importance of self-nurturing in a later article, but for now make sure you use at least some of this unplugged time to begin connecting with your family, your friends, or to spend some much needed time on YOU, not for laundry catch up, paying the bills, or other have-to’s.