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The Importance of Boundaries

Have you ever felt over-worked, over-stressed, bitter, resentful, taken advantage of, manipulated, dissatisfied-after a hard day’s work on the job? Chances are, you are lacking boundaries in your professional life. In the heat of the economic meltdown, many of us are aware of the daily reminders of on ongoing crisis and workloads are increasing along with the unemployment rate. This makes us more paranoid and we become willing to go above and beyond in many ways to secure our jobs. However, there is still a need to consider ourselves from a humane perspective. Admins need boundaries.

You may be that employee who always takes their lunch at 3:00 p.m. everyday. You may be someone who loses countless hours of sleep to finish a project. You may be doing overtime regularly and leaving the office in the mid-evening hours. Perhaps you are the employee who gets assigned unfair tasks and is treated with disrespect. As an employee, boundaries are not only vital to your mental and physical health but also to your job satisfaction.

Rebecca Shaw, a lowly assistant, was always getting trampled on. She was a kind, modest, well-mannered, employee who was just learning the ropes. She was eager to always help out when she could and performed on the job to the best of her ability. Helping others was her forte and she never said no to anyone. If someone spoke to her in a less than desirable manner, she would just accept it because times were tough on her financially and she was paranoid about losing her job. She sacrificed her sleep and her lunch break to get the job done. Before you know it, months went by and she found herself doing the work for others, working around the clock, malnourished from small or skipped lunches, stressed out by a limitless existence, and a victim of her own kindness. Rebecca is desperately in need of boundaries.

Admins are often bombarded with heavy workloads that don’t always seem reasonable. Effective time management is essential to having and maintaining boundaries at work. When Rebecca began to feel that she was stretching herself way too thin, she decided to change her approach and to set realistic limits and expectations. No longer would she take on more than she could handle. She would analyze her workload and plan ahead to allow an adequate amount of time to reach a stopping point or to complete a task. She decided to present the importance of taking a lunch break to her boss. She explained to her boss that she would like to meet to explore the possibility of setting up an operational schedule that incorporates an adequate amount of time for lunch.

If your boss is extremely tied up all of the time, try to communicate through an alternate medium like email or the telephone. She also suggested that they could meet at the very beginning of the day to plan activities that would be executed for that day. If you are a full time employee, you deserve to take a full hour lunch break at a time that is acceptable. You are not a robot. You are a human being. You need an adequate amount of sleep, downtime, and proper nutrition to get through the day, and the work week.

Just as with any other profession, admins deserve respect. Don’t allow anyone to bully or manipulate you into doing tasks that are not appropriate. For instance, some admins fall into the trap of becoming runners for personal errands for bosses and other employees. Unless you were hired on as a personal assistant, this is not appropriate. In addition to this, beware of employees who wrongfully delegate their tasks, duties, and responsibilities to admins. Admins do fall into the category of “service positions”; however, this does not make admins subservient or inferior in any way. In Rebecca’s case, her inability to say no left her overwhelmed with her workload and manipulated by fellow employees.

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