Protecting Your Boundaries Can Be Limiting: 3 Times It’s Best To Flex

At its worst, quiet quitting is slacking, laziness and being disrespectful to colleagues by putting unfair burden on them. At its best though, quiet quitting is rejecting hustle culture, managing boundaries and ensuring you have a healthy relationship with your work.

These are worthy goals, but managing boundaries effectively can be easier said than done. With ongoing shifts in career demands and the ebbs and flows of personal life, sometimes managing boundaries can be its own set of responsibilities. There are times when it’s best to flex—giving yourself permission to ease up, let down and relax your restrictions.

When Work Works

There’s a fallacy today that work is inherently a bad thing and that less work leads to more joy. Not every job is ideal and of course, and employers can always improve the conditions for work. But work also has value.

Work is one way you express your skills and talents, and it can be an important source of esteem. In addition, work can be an opportunity for learning and growth which are correlated with greater happiness. Work is also a way to connect with others through shared goals and mutual efforts. And work connects you with community. Having a sense of obligation and responsibility is also correlated with happiness and wellbeing. All work had dignity and makes a contribution to society—no matter what the job.

But boundaries also have benefits and when your sense of meaning and importance is more “dimensional” and comes from more sources—not just from work—your wellbeing is enhanced. This means that when you invest in your family, friends, community or side pursuits, you are likely to feel greater fulfillment overall.

Managing Your Boundaries

So how do you manage boundaries without being perceived as quitting quietly? How do you get the most from your work and have time for all the other aspects of life which are important?

You can use these strategies to do the best with your boundaries.

Let Your Priorities Guide You

Sometimes, managing your boundaries can feel like its own responsibility, and you don’t want to be subservient to your boundaries for their own sake. A better approach is to give yourself permission to flex your schedule and your standards in alignment with your overall priorities.

For example, if you set a boundary to leave on time every day and your work is complete, great. But if it’s the end of the day and you’re almost finished with the report, give yourself permission to invest another 20 minutes to complete it (assuming no one is waiting for you to show up for another commitment). By staying in the moment and completing the task, you honor your priority of following through and delivering work on time. In addition, you honor a goal to be efficient and effective, because by sticking with the task you actually save time in the longer term. You won’t have to recreate your thinking process—saving you effort overall.

Give thought to your boundaries as you’re respecting them, and ensure you’re staying true to the bigger picture of your overall intentions. Let yourself be more fluid in how you balance the commitment to your boundaries as well as the commitments you make to your broader objectives.

Let Your Relationships Guide You

Also consider the people around you. Of course, you need to take care of yourself in order to care for others, but happiness is also correlated with giving back. If you’re protecting a boundary at the expense of a colleague who is counting on you or a child who needs your attention, you may be compromising your happiness and theirs.

An admirable boundary may be to never access email after hours, but if an unusual problem has your team members burning the midnight oil to solve it, the time may be right to flex your boundary. Showing up, rolling up sleeves and going above and beyond when it’s necessary are good for the results you’ll drive and the team’s ability to achieve results. If work demands are always unrealistic, you’ll want to maintain your boundaries, but in special circumstances or situations where unusual effort is warranted, your work won’t be wasted.

Or consider times when you’ll want to ensure your family takes priority. In an all-time-great cell phone commercial a working mom is saying no (again) to her daughters who want to go to the beach because she has to meet with a client. Her daughter says, “Mommy, when can I be a client?” With that, the mom decides to take her client call from the beach, so she can enjoy the day with her children. It’s an example of putting family relationships first and making intentional decisions about which boundaries can flex in the right circumstances.

Let Your Identity Guide You

When you’re setting boundaries, also consider your future self and your identity. If you stay a bit past the end of the working day to finish the project, you may experience less pressure later, because the work is complete. Or if you set your alarm to start working earlier than usual and plan for your high-pressure presentation, your future self will thank you for the stress you’ll alleviate by feeling prepared. Staying slightly later or starting slightly earlier may betray boundaries in the strictest sense of the rules, but they’ll contribute to your overall sense of peace.

In addition, you can consider your identity as you manage your boundaries. The old saying is true, “How you spend your days is—in fact—how you spend your life,” and your choices reflect what you value. It’s true that you always have time for the things which you find most important.

Consider what you want to be known for—a reliable colleague, someone who performs with passion and excellence, a nurturing parent, a supportive friend—and make choices which are in alignment with the legacy you want to leave. Take the extra day of vacation so you can nurture your aging grandparent or knock off early on a Tuesday afternoon so you can be present at your niece’s soccer game—picking work up later, so you can do what you must for work. Flex when you can so your hour-by-hour choices are aligned with your lifetime intentions for whom you most want to be.

In Sum

Boundaries have become a big focus and they are healthy to maintain. But it’s also critical to give yourself permission to reflect on what’s most important and flex where it makes sense. Prioritize your desired performance, your relationships and your identity, rather than attending to your boundaries at the expense of your broader goals.