We hear it all the time.
You just need better work boundaries.
It’s usually well-intentioned advice.
It’s also one of those things that’s much easier to say than it is to do.
Because if you’ve ever answered a work call on a Sunday, checked emails while you were on holiday, or felt your stomach tighten the moment your phone buzzed, you’ll know that work boundaries aren’t something we just ‘decide’ to have one day.
They’re something we have to practise.
And that’s exactly why they’re so hard to keep.
The Sunday Lunch Example
My husband and I recently hosted friends for Sunday lunch.
Just as they arrived, one of them received a phone call from work.
She apologised, came inside, then immediately stepped back out onto our balcony to return the call. A few minutes later she came back in, apologising again.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I can’t believe they’re calling me on the weekend. This happens all the time.”
Not long afterwards, her phone rang again.
Then again while we were eating lunch.
I could see how uncomfortable she felt. She genuinely wanted to be present, but work kept pulling her away. Eventually she decided not to answer one of the calls while we were eating, but I could also see how distracted she was.
Because she’s a close friend, and because I know how stressed she’s been lately, I gently said,
There’s a good example of a boundary you need to set:
“I don’t take work calls on weekends.“
At the same time, I also understood exactly why she answered.
A few years ago, that would have been me.
If someone had suggested I stop answering, I know exactly what I would have thought.
But they need me.
It’s only going to take a minute.
There’s no one else they can call.
I’ll just deal with this one thing.
That afternoon got me thinking.
How do we actually change this?
Because looking back, I didn’t need someone to tell me to have better work boundaries.
I already knew that.
What I needed was to understand why keeping them felt almost impossible.
I Thought Being Available Made Me Valuable
For years, I wore my responsiveness like a badge of honour. If someone needed help, I’d help. If an email arrived, I’d answer it. If there was a problem, I’d jump in. I genuinely believed that being reliable meant always being available.
Years ago, I completed a leadership profile that described me as a Rapid Responder.
At first I took it as a compliment.
Later, during the training, I learnt there was another side to it..
In Liz Wiseman’s Multipliers research, Rapid Responders reply so quickly that people begin relying on them for everything. Without meaning to, they create dependence instead of capability.
That was a real lightbulb moment.
I wasn’t just helping people.
I was teaching them that I would always respond.
Sometimes the Pressure Isn’t Even Yours
One Christmas I arrived early at friends’ place in the country to spend Christmas with them.
I’d been working on a customer deal that everyone hoped would be signed before Christmas, but the customer had already told me they were heading away early with family and would finalise everything after the holidays.
At 3pm on Christmas Eve, my manager called.
There was pressure from higher up to get the deal signed before Christmas, and he wanted me to call the customer.
Looking back now, I can almost picture that pressure travelling down through the organisation until it landed on my phone.
My manager wasn’t trying to ruin anyone’s Christmas, he was under pressure too.
But the moment I answered, I felt like that pressure had become mine. I went into a spin wondering what to do.
There was no way I was going to interrupt my customer’s Christmas with their family. Calling them wasn’t going to change the outcome. It would only damage the relationship.
Eventually I explained exactly that to my manager.
But for a while, it genuinely didn’t feel like I had a choice.
When you’ve spent years being “the reliable one”, saying no doesn’t feel like setting a boundary.
It feels like letting people down.
My Nervous System Had Learnt Too
It wasn’t just phone calls.
For years, my work phone notifications came through on my personal phone, 24 hours a day.
I wasn’t always expected to do anything, sometimes I simply received the notification because of my role.
Every single buzz triggered the same reaction. My shoulders tightened, my thoughts jumped straight back to work and my body reacted before my brain had even worked out whether anything actually needed me.
One of the small steps I took during burnout recovery was separating my work phone from my personal phone.
Only then did I realise how constantly switched on I’d been.
Work Boundaries Are Something We Practise
One of my managers once gave me some advice I’ve never forgotten.
I shared a moment of overwhelm about my never-ending stream of emails, and asked him how he managed it – surely as the leader of the team, he must receive even more than me?
His answer surprised me:
Sometimes, I just leave them.
I couldn’t imagine doing that.
He explained that quite often one of three things happened.
- Someone else answered it.
- The person figured it out themselves.
- Or it turned out not to be important after all.
That conversation stayed with me because I realised I wasn’t only responding to work.
I was responding to my own discomfort.
Answering quickly made me feel useful.
It relieved my anxiety.
It gave me certainty.
But it also taught everyone around me that I would always be available.
The Hardest Boundary Was the One I Set Inside Myself
People often talk about setting work boundaries as though it’s a single conversation.
I don’t think it works like that.
Looking back, I don’t think the hardest part was saying no to work.
The hardest part was letting go of the belief that always being available made me a better employee.
For years, I’d measured my value by how quickly I responded, how many problems I solved and how much pressure I could absorb from other people. Being reliable had quietly become tangled up with being constantly available.
Changing that belief was much harder than ignoring a phone call.
It meant redefining what being a “good employee” actually looked like.
And that didn’t happen overnight.
Final Thoughts
Healthy work boundaries aren’t built through one big conversation.
They’re built through lots of small decisions that feel uncomfortable at first and surprisingly normal later on.
I’m not suggesting we never help colleagues or answer an occasional urgent call. Sometimes work genuinely does need us.
But if everything feels urgent, perhaps it’s worth asking ourselves a different question.
Have we unintentionally taught ourselves – and everyone around us – that we’re always available?
Looking back, I think this was the biggest lesson burnout taught me about work boundaries.
Setting work boundaries isn’t hard because we don’t know what to do. It’s hard because we’ve spent years conditioning ourselves to believe that being constantly available is part of being good at our job.
People don’t learn our work boundaries from what we say. They learn them from what we repeatedly do.
Every time we answer a Sunday phone call, reply to a late-night email or interrupt dinner because work calls, we’re teaching people what to expect from us. Every time we choose not to, we’re teaching something different.
The encouraging part is that patterns can change.
So can habits.
And over time, so can we.
If you’d like some ideas on boundaries for work and home, you might like to check out this blog post: Boundaries for Burnout: 50 Work and Home Boundaries to Protect Your Energy
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