On Boundaries

It is no secret that I have long struggled with boundaries, in pretty much every facet of my life. Today I want to focus on professional/personal, since that’s the most common one people like myself are terrible at. Because I have some thoughts.

Boundaries, a history

The first time I started to realize I needed to rethink my capitalist upbringing was when I moved to New York and was working full time as a barista (and later, as an assistant manager of that same cafe). Like most food service/retail gigs, being a shift worker meant that there is no consistent schedule and that despite your low pay, you’re expected to be theoretically available to cover a shift 24/7 or else THE CAFE WOULD FALL INTO CHAOS AND IT WILL BE YOUR FAULT FOR BEING AT A MOVIE AND NOT SITTING AT HOME WAITING FOR WORK TO CALL. Here’s how that manipulation works:

1. Don’t hire enough people, but emphasize how you’re not just coworkers, you’re a family
2. Have just enough perks and lovely-at-first higher-ups to lull your employees into a false sense of “this place is different!”
3. Make sure there’s no consistently emphasized vacation/paid leave policy, meaning any time off is a financial or productivity loss for the employee
4. Force employees, not management, to find their own coverage for vacations, shift changes, and sickness so they’re forced to confront their fellow overworked, underpaid coworkers family members about their needs and then perhaps think better of it and just come in as scheduled anyways
5. Be a business operating under capitalism where there’s already an overriding, implicit understanding that to succeed at work you must go above and beyond your contract if you want to be taken seriously/be considered for raises & promotions/continue to be employee

I once even worked most of a shift, unpaid, because a friend of mine who worked at a different branch of the cafe I worked at was sick and couldn’t get ahold of his manager or any coworkers and was working an afternoon shift entirely alone. While he slept off his sickness in a booth, I finished his shift for him.

As a kid [in a patriarchal capitalist society], you’re taught that to be competent is the baseline; if you want to get ahead, to be seen as a team player and a person worthy of advancement, you’ll have to do more than simply what’s expected. While it’s rarely explicit that you should expect to work longer hours than agreed, many that are entirely unpaid, there’s an unspoken assumption. The world doesn’t function entirely within work hours, and life is chaotic and unpredictable. Sometimes, if you’re a serious worker who’s serious about being taken seriously, you give a little more.

When I went to work for MTV, I didn’t have to enforce boundaries because the nature of the work did it for me. As an intern, my hours were clear and my access to my work content was fully restricted out of office, so when I wasn’t at work, I physically couldn’t be working. As a temp, same deal. And as an Associate Producer, I was so underutilized I barely got work when I was physically in the office (so it’s no surprise my contract wasn’t picked up after nine months on the “job.”)

Then, I started working for internet start ups.

Boundaries, a laughable fictional concept for babies

When I first started working for Stareable, I was an unpaid “Community Liaison” who would write blogs and advise on social media/business practices in a limited capacity. As that “limited” capacity grew, I was a “part time” worker paid for 15 hours a week but quickly working closer to 50. Because I’d never been a full time freelancer before, the idea that I should track my hours closely without clearly defined business hours (for myself as an employee or for the company at large) was completely foreign. Here’s the thing: there’s always work to be done at a start up, and because there’s rarely more than a handful of employees (for much of my time at Stareable I was the sole non-CEO employee), there aren’t standardized business hours. There’s simply: hours when you’re working and hours when you’re thinking about working.

The same is largely true at Seed&Spark, where I currently work, and at both grad programs I teach for. It’s even worse now because we’re a cross-country team at Seed&Spark with everyone working slightly different hours, so while I clock out officially at 6pm EST (even now that I’m based in the west), many of my coworkers still have 3-4 more regular work hours. Also, one of my grad programs is on the west coast, and one is on the east, further splitting my time and extending my expected availability for events, meetings, classes, calls, and more.

Not to mention the fact that in both cases for Stareable and Seed&Spark, the company is a website, and people visit web sites at all hours of the day and night, even on weekends and holidays. Add in the limited funds of start ups (especially media start ups), the limited staffing where most if not all positions are single points of failure (ie- one person’s out and thus one or more job duties straight up cannot be completed because they’re the sole person who does it), and the 24/7 nature of Existing On The Internet For Public Visitation, and you’ve got a tried and true recipe for burnout.

After being burnt out basically as often as the website was available (24/7, if you need reminding), at Stareable I started instituting a few small boundaries which improved my quality of life significantly (when they were followed, by me or my coworkers):

1. No non-emergency Slacks after 7pm (1 hour after my usual work hours). Because Slack functions as an instant messenger and it’s harder to easily archive messages for later dealing-with, I made it a policy that any coworker with a need of me post-7pm that wasn’t a catastrophic company-ending emergency needed to be an email, something I could more easily organize and queue for response once work hours resumed
2. Setting Do Not Disturb on Slack from 7pm to 9am so I don’t even get notified of new messages during my off hours
3. Closing out of work tabs when the day is done, or using an entirely different browser for work and for personal use
4. Not responding to or acknowledging messages sent outside of work hours, from coworkers or from users/customers

Notice “work only the scheduled hours per week, or, failing that, make up for overworked days/weeks by taking equivalent time off” is not on that list.

I have largely maintained this list of boundaries as best I can at Seed&Spark, though it’s a larger company with more coworkers and more users dealing with bigger (see: money-related) issues more regularly and these rules are harder to enforce. I have added a few additional rules to the list, though:

1. No responding to users from my personal accounts (email, social media, website) during work hours or beyond it. The appropriate channel for professional inquiries is and always has been my work email, the crowdfunding general inquiries inbox, and the customer support chat, for future reference. Yes, people have messaged me via my website in order to get my attention about a work thing.
2. Because I regularly work beyond work hours for events and other reasons, I have reclaimed a bit of my usual work time that was previously set aside for therapy & the commute surrounding it for writing. The first two hours of every Thursday is me time, writing time, no work emails or Slacks allowed.

Are boundaries even real if it’s a passion project?

This is one of the places I’ve struggled most as a person bad at boundaries- placing boundaries for myself. I used to pride myself for not taking any days off for months at a time, because after work and on weekends I was on sets, I was podcasting, I was editing podcasts or films, I was agonizing over my next project, etc etc.

That’s why the New Years Resolution I’ve been really grateful for in 2021 is the one about taking at least two days off a month, which some people have balked at  (–“you mean in addition to weekends, right?” “lol no”) but has really made an impact. I’ve rediscovered some beloved, non-monetizable hobbies, gotten off my butt, and had some really wonderful days where I was truly in the moment the whole time.

It doesn’t change the fact that I still have a tendency to feel antsy and anxious when I could be more productive, though. This is especially complicated because I’m obviously not where I want to be in my career yet, and the kind of career I want requires a lot of up front free investment, which necessitates carving out after paid work time to dedicate to it. And every day I’m not a working writer it gets a little bit harder to take time off, to relax. Sometimes I get such intense fear about never getting to where I’ve worked so hard to get that I make myself physically ill.

While I’m trying to prioritize my mental and physical health at least as much as my career aspirations, there is only so much time in the day, and during some months of the year I have up to 4-5 jobs I’m working to pay the bills/for my next production.

Boundaries, but make it a meme

The above tweet went viral for simultaneously all the right and all the wrong reasons recently, saying the quiet part loud: your responsibility as an employee is to shoulder the burden of making your workplace run smoothly, and anyone who takes time off for any reason needs to consider the business and other employees first. Which is… straight up not how that works? That’s the job of managers/department heads?

But it’s also the way I have been conditioned as a member of the full time workforce for almost a decade. Because of the emphasis on how we’re not a company, we’re a family. Because of the consistent understaffing in literally every industry I’ve ever worked in. Because we exist in a capitalist society that prioritizes working harder and faster and more than you’re technically paid for to be seen as even a good employee, let alone a great one.

If this seems over dramatic, think about it: if someone where you worked did exactly what they were told and no more, if they showed up exactly when their shift started and left exactly when it ended, regardless of what else was happening, if they did the average amount of work well but didn’t take on additional responsibilities or take initiative with their work or the broader company culture, would you consider them for a promotion? Would you consider them for a raise? Would you consider them an exceptional worker, or merely an average one? The honest answer unearths some uncomfortable truths.

And this isn’t even taking into account that the standard 40 hour work week is not only extremely outdated for most modern industries, but also too much work itself given that when the 40 hour week  became standardized, not only were married women far less likely to hold jobs in the first place, but they were also, in some cases, literally banned from holding them. Compare that to now, where most households are dual income, meaning that both partners are working their 40 hours… plus the additional unpaid overtime (since salaried workers rarely qualify for overtime) and because of the nature of modern work they’re able to be accessed by bosses and coworkers 24/7. I use the same computer for work as I do for “play” and the line is often nonexistent.

There’s also the complicating factor of the tweet I screenshotted, and the other side of it that it isn’t saying- taking PTO or a full non-working lunch break could also impact your own work. I know people who don’t take lunch breaks because it will make their post-lunch work more hectic and frustrating, so instead of just being worried we’ll negatively impact our similarly overworked coworkers, we’re also worried about making our own burnout worse if we don’t continue to burn ourselves out a little bit. You gotta spend burnout to cure burnout, ya know?

Hot take: if your employees can’t even take a half hour break for lunch away from their phones/computers without the rest of their day being adversely affected by what they missed, you need to rethink your business model. If your employees feel they can’t take time off for physical sickness (or worse, are continuously contacted in spite of being out sick), for mental health, or for important family/friend events because it will affect their own jobs and the jobs of their coworkers adversely, you need to get your house in order. You need to hire coverage so folks can stagger their breaks without losing work continuity, you need to hire coverage so folks aren’t single points of failure at all, let alone in multiple ways, and if you can’t afford to hire coverage, then something else has to give. Take on fewer clients, shut down lines of business that aren’t holding up their end of the financial bargain, and scale things at pace with your workers’ capacity, not your customers’ demands.

There is no ethical consumption or fully healthy boundary under capitalism

When your ability to be alive is tied to your ability to earn, and your ability to earn is tied to your willingness to work beyond what you earn to eventually earn more, you’ve got what’s called a “extremely bad economic system that prioritizes profits for the few over the quality of life of the many.” The worker doesn’t profit directly (or often even indirectly) from their extra work, the company/owner does. And I’m not just talking about the fact that they’re getting straight up free labor because they’ve dangled the potential for better pay just out of reach of their agreed-upon hours. I’m talking about how the company gets the benefit of paying for nearly twice as many workers at half the cost because everyone takes on a little bit more, and so the company learns (consciously or not) that they can grow their profits while keeping their expenses and staff lean. They are reinforced in their understanding that their company CAN, in fact, function without paying overtime, because employees will work it anyways! They now have proof that while their workforce may be miserable, they’re still profitable and productive because, again, if they leave they’ll die. It’s not about loyalty (even when a worker thinks it is), it’s about survival. So how can we possibly advocate for our well being when the very fact that we’re being paid at all is literally keeping us alive?

Some companies more effectively rebrand this as pride in your work, or as pride in what your work allows you to do (the latter is even stronger in healthcare industries). Therefore overworking becomes loyalty and belief in the brand rather than… overworking. And once you’ve set a pace you’re able to maintain, regardless of personal price, the company sets that as your baseline. Now if you try to step back and take on a more reasonable pace, you’ll look like a slacker. See how that works?

It’s a deeply toxic cycle that almost no company on Earth is innocent of. And even when a company is doing their best, the unbearably condescending culture of prioritizing productivity above all else prevails first and foremost.

This started as a personal reflection on my difficulty setting and maintaining professional boundaries as a highly ambitious person who thrives on being busy, and ended as a rant against capitalism, but if you thought that wouldn’t be the natural conclusion then you’re either wealthy or willfully ignorant. This isn’t to say that I’m not at least a little bit at fault for much of my own burnout: there’s a level of personal accountability here that I’m not great at being firm on (yes, because of the aforementioned culture but also yes, because of my own shit), and yes, I have taken on more jobs that perhaps is healthy (paid and unpaid) because of my crippling fear of unemployment (hey wait, that’s capitalism again…) and not living up to my professional potential.

Things I will own:

1. My chosen career is one that for better or worse (worse) requires a lot of up front free work developing and writing and producing content to prove I should eventually get paid to do it
2. Because there is no predictable linear progression to achieve my aspirational career, and because it’s a bit of a numbers game, the more artistic side hustles I cultivate the more opportunities I have to finally make a splash, or a connection
3. I have a tendency to say yes too quickly and fail to advocate for myself because in most cases I can do whatever I agree to, it just comes at a cost (that is usually never seen at work so it’s like it doesn’t exist, right?!)
4. Because of my history of finding myself unexpectedly unemployed despite excellent work that always went above and beyond what I was literally asked to do/paid to work, I have a tendency to hoard jobs in fear of the next cycle of unemployment. While the money is helpful and will in fact cushion me should my floor fall out from beneath me again, it is not immediately necessary for my survival or quality of life to have all these jobs
5. I took out way too many student loans and will be underneath them until I either die penniless or get wildly famous, which definitely affects my month to month living expenses
6. I have a tendency to romanticize being overworked despite understanding that this mindset is toxic capitalist propaganda. There’s a difference between understanding and internalizing, though.

Things I will not own:

1. The fact that for whatever reason every job I’ve found myself in for the past 6 years has in some way necessitated working beyond 40 hours a week just to tread water and getting paid far below industry standard for work that makes me overqualified for similarly paid, far further down the ladder gigs
2. The fact that I have been a single point of failure at every job I’ve held (except at MTV, where frankly they had too many staff members, or at least too many department heads) since college
3. The fact that while I’ve often been encouraged these past years to take some time off, due to my being a single point of failure the amount of time off I can take is laughably small and always always always negatively affects my time when I return, meaning that if I left for a bit due to burnout, you better believe I lose any progress I made away as soon as I’m back
4. The fact that capitalism is an inherently unethical economic system because the beneficiaries of capitalism are never the people making it flourish and exploitation is not just a suggestion of maintaining this system but a requirement. Worth mentioning that many business owners (especially start ups/newer businesses) wish this weren’t true- I know my various bosses wish they could pay their employees more to work less, but they are victims of having to pay themselves to live and therefore make money with their company as well. It doesn’t change the fact that most businesses are inherently exploitative, though, by design or by default of existing under capitalism, and that a truly ethical business would make decisions not for the business but for the employees, even if that means slower growth. Which of course makes investors nervous and may hurt market saturation opportunities which is it’s OWN can of beans. Is this a circular sentence beginning and ending with capitalism being bad? Yes.
5. The fact that billionaires existing is a policy failure and yes, the existence of Jeff Bezos directly affects my Bri Castellini burnout.

So what’s the point? This isn’t a subtweet (subblog?) of any current or former employers. This also isn’t a subtweet/blog of myself, a person who for far too long has insisted I’m fine, I can keep working forever and ever, consequences be damned. This isn’t even fully a treatise against capitalism, though it very well could be. It’s just stuff I’ve been thinking of more since the pandemic, and a conversation I’ve had with more and more friends as we’ve all had to take a hard look at what we spend our time on and why.

I think… I want/need a life? Not a job, though I’d like a pretty specific one. But I can’t keep living exclusively to work and to derive all of my self worth and self esteem from my ability to produce. And I can’t keep exploiting myself or allowing myself to be exploited for increasingly diminishing returns. I take so much pride in the work I do (paid and unpaid). I love being a film educator, I love being a podcaster, I love being a writer/director.

But I also love painting colorful sunsets and slightly lopsided trees. I love taking my mom’s dog for long walks. I love playing board games with my family, I love driving for hours listening to podcasts with Quinn, I love having drinks with friends. And I think I need to start valuing these moments more, and allowing myself to be sucked into work (be it passion project or paycheck) less, especially when I know I’ve already given more than enough of myself during my contracted hours.

So. New rules.

1. No non-emergency Slacks after 7pm EST (I will be maintaining EST hours for as long as I can- I like getting out of work when there’s still light and businesses are still open!)
2. Not responding to or acknowledging messages sent outside of work hours, from coworkers or from users/customers
3. Move all my work tabs to a new window that I can minimize and not see when I’m not on the clock
4. No responding to users from my personal accounts (email, social media, website) during work hours or beyond it.
5. Maintain my Thursday writing time and be more conscious of “well what if I reply to this ONE email”
6. Take vacations. Not working vacations where I take time off to shoot a film or record tons of podcasts in a manic bender, NON-working vacations
7. Set aside hobby time on the weekends or after long days rather than collapsing into a coma of binge-watching TV and multitasking by agonizing over what work I could be doing instead
8. Go outside more. I was far less burnt out before the pandemic (imagine that) and one of the ways I feel more like myself and less like a cog in the machine is to break up my day with little walks, trips to and from a coffee shop, anything to get me out of my stagnant seat for a little while.

I look forward to adding more. What are YOUR professional/personal boundaries you’re dedicated to maintaining more strongly?