Episode 3: Build Boundaries Before You Burn Out
How to draw the line when no one else will.
When your coworker ghosts, your boss shrugs, and your calendar eats your soul.
Summary:
In this episode of the Hard at Work podcast, Ellen Whitlock Baker addresses common workplace challenges, particularly focusing on issues of respect and communication between employees and bosses. She provides actionable advice on how to navigate difficult situations with coworkers and supervisors, emphasizing the importance of setting boundaries to prevent burnout. The conversation also delves into effective time management strategies and ways to improve meeting efficiency, encouraging listeners to advocate for their own well-being in the workplace.
Takeaways:
1. Boundaries are essential, not optional.
If you want to avoid burnout and lead effectively, you must set and protect your time. Healthy work boundaries help you stay clear-headed, productive, and prevent emotional exhaustion.
2. Stop back-to-back meetings—your brain needs space.
Stacked meeting days are a fast track to fatigue and poor decision-making. Build breaks into your calendar to reset, reflect, and actually do the work.
3. After-hours work shouldn't be your norm.
Answering emails at night may feel productive, but it erodes your personal time and keeps your body in a chronic stress cycle. Protecting your time off makes you sharper during the workday.
4. Unproductive meetings are costing you—and your team.
Say no to meetings without a clear purpose or agenda. Create simple meeting boundaries that save time, cut confusion, and reduce unnecessary emotional labor.
5. Leadership means modeling what you want to see.
Telling your team to take breaks doesn’t work if you don’t. Show them it's okay to log off, say no, and protect their well-being—because your behavior sets the tone.
Notable Quotes
“Life is short, people. Don’t let your workplace use it all up.”
“If you're letting too much of your work bleed into your personal time, you're paving a path to burnout.”
“You have to protect these breaks with your life.”
“Even if you think, ‘it's just this one time,’ breaking your boundary opens the floodgates.”
“Not everything is urgent. And if everything is, then something’s broken.”
Chapters:
00:00 – Intro & Anonymous AMA Setup
02:35 – The Question: “My Coworker Doesn’t Listen”
06:20 – Why Your Boss Might Be Failing You
10:45 – Time to Set Some Boundaries
14:30 – Boundary #1: Rethink Your Meeting Schedule
22:40 – Boundary #2: Reclaim Your Off Hours
28:00 – Boundary #3: Fix Your Meetings, Not Just Your Face
33:05 – Three Challenges for You This Week
35:10 – Final Thoughts & Call to Action
Keywords: workplace challenges, setting boundaries, time management, meeting efficiency, employee respect, boss communication, workplace dynamics, emotional labor, productivity tips, burnout prevention
Transcript:
Ellen Whitlock Baker (00:02)
Hi everyone and welcome to today's episode of the Hard at Work podcast. Thank you so much for listening and I'm happy to be here with you today. Today's episode is a solo episode and in each of these and in some with some of my super awesome guests, I will be tackling a question that you can't ask at work but you need advice on.
Maybe you don't know how to get your boss to stop micromanaging or you know that your direct report is unhappy, but you don't know how to help them. Anything goes, anything goes. If you want to submit your own totally, and if you want to submit your own totally anonymous question, go to ewbcoaching.com backslash ama-about-work and tell me all about it. And I'll have the link in the show notes too.
So today's question was a bit of a gut punch for me and I'll tell you why in a minute, but here it is. The person, but here it is. I have a coworker who is not doing anything I asked them to do. I have spoken to my boss about it, but they can't, they haven't, blah, blah, blah. I have spoken to my boss about it, but they haven't done anything to correct the behavior. My boss just said to CC them on all of my requests to this coworker.
I feel simultaneously like a narc and disrespected. How can I work to make this situation better? I've been on both sides of this equation personally, both as the frustrated and disrespected employee and as the boss not correcting behavior quick enough, which is thus the guc- And as the boss not crea-
and as the boss not correcting behavior quickly enough, thus the gut punch. Thus the gut punch. So let's break this down and see what we can uncover. First, I am super sorry this is happening to you. It's frustrating and feeling disrespected at work is awful. And it's hard to trust a boss when they're letting you down on this front. I'm gonna share a few suggestions.
but acknowledging here that they all involve emotional work being done by you, the person being disrespected, which shouldn't be the case, which shouldn't be the case. So if you're a boss, listen up so you can think about how not to do this in your workplace. Here are some things I might try. Here are some things I might try. First, you could try telling your boss honestly that you feel like they're letting you down.
You might be surprised to find they didn't realize it or that they didn't think the situation was as big of a deal as it was. But if you're in a place with a relatively safe and well-meaning boss, you might want to give this a try. Or you could try this tactic if you're in a more formal relationship with your boss. Ask your boss why they aren't taking action. And you can do this from a curious place. Hey boss, I've told you that...
coworker isn't doing anything I'm asking them to do and it's affecting both my work outcome and my personal wellbeing in this workplace, feeling like I'm telling on my coworker and disrespected because they're not listening to me. I'm not seeing any action being taken and I'm curious if that's accurate or if there's something else I should know about what's going on. And then finally, you can make a list of your work that intersects with your coworkers.
And a final option, you can make a list of your work that intersects with your coworkers and detail what their lack of action is resulting in and share this with your boss. I'd advise to do this in person and follow up in writing so you have it all documented and do this every time you have a one-on-one with your boss. You wanna be really, really careful to show that there any, you wanna be really, really careful to show that any failure to launch isn't because of you. It's because this person isn't doing what they're supposed to do.
Take notes and keep track of the times that their lack of action hurt your outcomes, not necessarily for anyone but yourself, so you can have a clear record to send to HR if the shit hits the fan.
also want to acknowledge that this might be a higher up issue. Perhaps your boss doesn't feel like they can tell their boss or HR about the situation because it makes them look weak, or they're already working overtime to get approval. And if your boss isn't a white man, they're working overtime. Or they're already working overtime to get approval in the workplace. And this doesn't make it right, but it could be behind what's happening too.
And here's a little insight with my personal experience here. When I was a supervisor, I had a few team members share with me that one of the other team members wasn't pulling their weight. I started conversations with HR immediately and I started documenting, but because of the way that HR works, which is a topic for a whole other episode, I couldn't tell my team members what I was doing and that I was working towards a PIP, a performance improvement plan, blah.
I couldn't tell my team members that I was working towards a performance improvement plan for their coworker and I couldn't jump to a pip right away according to HR. So they were getting increasingly frustrated and thinking I was doing nothing. But here's the deal. I also, if I'm gonna be totally honest, got sunk by my own empathy because the person who wasn't pulling their weight was going through a lot of hard stuff.
and my desire to be kind and liked was overriding my duty to do everything I could to make my whole team successful. By focusing on helping the person who wasn't doing what I was asking of them, I took the focus off the team as a whole and off of the people who were telling me, they were telling me that they needed help. So in hindsight, which is a total bitch, I should have found ways to take action sooner, even if HR was holding me back.
also completely fell into fix it mode, another not great thing that I did, which is where I tried to cover for this person or move work around so I could not have to deal with the problem for a little bit longer. And that's just prolonging the problem. And that's painful for everyone.
It's not fun to let people go, it's awful. We all know that and I didn't want it to come to that but when I was ready, I couldn't move forward as quickly as I wanted to because of our HR guidelines. So two things. One is that your boss may be taking action and you just can't know about it yet but even so, they should be able to tell you that they're hearing you and working on a plan of action. That's all they need to say and probably all they actually can say but at least you're feeling heard.
And caveat, if you're getting this answer for months, then yeah, that action's never gonna happen. So at that point, you may need to decide to just cut ties. In a work environment with true trust, we would know that was the truth and trust that something is going to happen if your boss tells you that they're working on it. It's when we don't build trust supervisors that your team is left feeling like you're not helping or not listening to them.
or completely ignoring them in this case. So don't make the mistake of dismissing your team when they're telling you that something's wrong. It takes a ton of bravery to even tell you that they're having a hard time with a coworker because our workplace norms prefer us to hide things like that and pretend they aren't there or make them the team's problem and not yours. And if you're conflict diverse, you're even more likely to sit on things like this and not do anything. So if a team member tells you something is up,
I would suggest taking immediate action and letting your team member know you've done so. You don't have to tell them what you did, but you can say, I am working on it and check in with them as things go forward. Be as transparent as you can be and do the hard thing, which is tell the person who's not pulling their weight that they have to do so. So I hope that's someone, I hope that's helpful.
I hope that's helpful. And if anyone has any other advice for this listener, send us an email at ama at ewbcoaching.com and we'll publish it on the AMA page. And as you just discovered, as you just discovered, as if you didn't know already, I've made my share of mistakes at work. So I'm going to try to be as open and honest with you.
when I have or we're talking about a situation that I have a similar experience with where maybe I didn't do the right thing and I want to explain what I've learned. So hopefully it prevents you from making these same mistakes. It's a little vulnerable. It's a little scary. I don't love telling you when I'm wrong, but I think it's really important in how we're learning and unlearning together. Okay, on to today's topic, setting boundaries at work.
Not being able to set boundaries at work is a problem I have struggled with. And one I see many of my friends and clients struggle with. I spent years giving extra time to work because I didn't know how to set and respect boundaries. And we all know that means I had to take time from somewhere in order to give more of it to work. And that was usually time with my family or time for myself.
And I don't want any of you to keep doing that because you don't have to. So today we're gonna cover when you should set boundaries, why you're not setting them and how to set them. And then I'm gonna challenge you with three boundaries I want you to set at work today. Sounds scary? So does that sound scary? And then I'm gonna challenge you with three boundaries I want you to set at work today. Think you can't do it, not in your particular work for work.
Blah, Think you can't do it, not in your particular workplace? Keep listening and I'll tell you how. Life is short people. Don't let your workplace use it all up. So in my own experience and as I started coaching more and more folks, I saw a common theme among those that were in these higher level positions of power. They sacrifice a lot of their personal time for work time and they burn out.
quickly and often dramatically, the two most common boundaries that I see folks not protect are, one, how they spend their time at work, and two, their time away from the office. So let's talk about the first one, how you spend your time at work. Here are some of the signs that you're not setting and protecting boundaries that will help you do your job to the best of your ability without burning you out.
here are some signs that you're not setting and protecting boundaries at work. One, your schedule is jam-packed with no spaces between meetings, whether you're in office or at home or both. Two, you get twitchy if you're away from Teams or Slack or email for too long. You're worried that someone was trying to get in touch with you, but you weren't there to immediately answer, and you gotta pick up your phone and check it.
And three, you spend most of your days in non-working meetings, meaning you talk about something and create work for yourself in the meeting, but you're not actually getting anything done during the meeting. So you have a whole day of making more work for yourself without any time to do it. Does that sound familiar? It definitely does to me. So let's talk about it. Let's talk about some practical ways boundaries can start to help here.
So first, when your schedule is wall-to-wall meetings, something needs to change. It is an unsustainable way to work or live. First of all, our brains as humans, they do not work like that. Meeting overload causes your brain to keep spinning in that stress cycle, kind of like on Apple computers, that little rainbow ball that twirls when your computer is futzing out.
And this increases all of the bad things that happen when you're not in this when.
which increases all of the bad things that happen when you're in the stress cycle for too long, which is fatigue, indecision, overwhelm, irritation. You are honestly not your best by your third or fourth meeting. And I want you to think about that. You know this, right? Like you know by meeting three of seven in one day, which I know many of you have days like that, you are high.
by meeting three of seven, which I know many of you have days like that, you're hangry, you're crabby, and you're spending half the meeting surreptitiously looking at Instagram or texting with your partner or sending memes to the person across the table from you or answering other emails. Is this a way to work? You're not giving your full attention to the room, so that meeting is not efficient already, and you're just.
actually not able to absorb all the things you need to absorb and think the way that you need to think. Yet this is this pervasive, busy culture that we have at work that should be, that where we all think that our schedules should be stacked, especially the higher up we go, the more meetings we should have in a day. And then in your off time is when you actually do the work and answer the emails and all of the things like that. So when you think about that,
It's kind of ridiculous and we don't need to do it like that. Let's work in a way that's more sustainable for us so we don't burn out and so we don't burn other people out and we actually enjoy our work time. Not saying you have to be best friends with everybody at work, but you shouldn't be miserable. So boundary one, do not let yourself have back-to-back meeting days. If you've got someone helping you with scheduling,
have them put at least a half an hour buffer between meetings, ideally an hour. Make sure you take a lunch break where you physically get up from your desk and move somewhere else. Even if it's just going to sit in the staff lounge and read a book, go elsewhere, get out of the space and walk around. This will help your brain work better and it helps your brain transition from sitting in meeting time versus I'm doing something else time.
If you have a longer meeting, like we all do, we have retreats, we have board meetings, we have three hour meetings, talking about a new concept, brainstorming, whatever, save the beginning or the end of the day for quiet dusk time for yourself. So if you manage your own schedule, save the beginning or end of the day.
So boundary one, do not let yourself have back-to-back meeting days. You should not have eight hours plus of meetings with no breaks. It won't work. So put at least a half an hour buffer between meetings, ideally an hour if you can. Take your lunch break. Take a whole hour, or even if you can only do a half hour that day, don't use it to work at your desk. Take it.
and give your brain a rest. It will make you better at everything you're handling the rest of the day. And if you're in a day where you're in a retreat or a board meeting, or you just can't get away from having four or five meetings in a row, make sure you save yourself an hour before all of your meetings start in the morning or at the end of the day for quiet desk time so that you don't, so that you can actually sit
and get some work done and be in silence for a little bit, which is really helpful for those of us who get overstimulated really easily from the constant having to be on. And here is something hugely important. You have to protect these breaks with your life. It's way too easy to use them for impromptu meetings.
always going to be a crisis. Someone's always going to need to talk to you. And sure, sometimes you have to be in crisis. And sometimes what the person needs to talk about is really important. And you do have to drop everything. I'm not saying every single day can be beautifully scheduled with an hour between meetings. But unless you're actively saving lives, you can do this. The pros are that you're keeping yourself out of the stress cycle spin. You're thinking clearer. And you're having an overall better attitude.
What you're also doing is modeling. You're showing your other team members that this is an okay way to work. It is okay not to work straight through. You're getting more work actually done. Your spacing of meetings helps space out all of the new projects that you're being asked to take on in like a commensurate manner. It's win-win. And it's really, really important that if you are a leader, you do model this.
So don't say something to your employees like, you should take an hour between meetings and take your lunch break and all of this and do something different. Because if they see you doing something differently and all the other leaders in the organization or the company, they're gonna think they have to do that. So it's really about what you actually show that you're doing in your work.
So if you're listening to this and thinking, gee Ellen, that's a great idea, but that would never work in my workplace. I totally understand, but I'm gonna challenge you. Run a little experiment. Even if it's just preserving two hours of desk time a week, start. Even if it's just preserving two hours of desk time a week, do it and see what happens. Does the world fall apart or?
does it make a positive difference in your work? And I'm guessing you'll see it makes a positive difference in your work and you can point that out at work. Hey, I'm taking these breaks because it helps me think clearer, be nicer, be more ready to go in meetings, be more strategic. There are a lot of ways that you can advocate for yourself to have to take this break. And let me tell you, you, and if you're having to advocate for this, like,
a lot at work and your boss is hesitant to let you have these spaces in your workday, that's a really big red flag. So hopefully you're working somewhere where your boss and your coworkers are gonna be like, yeah, that's a great idea. I totally understand it. I'll respect your time and I'm gonna do it too. Okay, so we talked about...
So we talked about when you should set boundaries being. So back to the two most common boundaries that I see people not setting. One is how they spend their time at work, which we just talked about. Two is how you spend your time away from the office, which is kind of interesting to think about because it shouldn't matter at all how you spend your time away from the office to your work, but it does.
If you're letting too much of your work bleed into your personal time, you are paving a path to burnout. One of my clients told me this heartbreaking story of how their son said to them, why are you always on your computer when you're supposed to be hanging out with us? And I've certainly been the recipient of why aren't you home more or why can't you come to my recital next week? It is heartbreaking. Whether you have kids or not,
or a caretaker or not, or even just getting your own self through the world, you have to take time away from work. So back to your brain again, science. Working too much beyond your work hours contributes to chronic stress, where your brain is spinning in that stress cycle.
where your brain is spinning in that stress cycle without the ability to complete it and reduce those stress hormones that are keeping your body on alert. If you stay in chronic stress, like I said before, you begin to exhibit fatigue, foggy thinking, and increased risk of anxiety and depression and more. Long-term consequences of chronic stress and overwork can actually increase the risk of developing dementia and Alzheimer's, which was...
terrifying for me to read. So knowing all this, why, friends, why would you continue to do this to yourself? The answer usually is fear. You work all night to answer these emails because you can't, you work all night to answer the emails that you can't get to during the day because you're afraid of letting your team down or you can't, you need to be able to answer
the emails in order to help your team move along with the projects they're working on. You can't stop checking your email out of habit from your phone while you're relaxing with your family and suddenly you get one that spikes your heart rate and you have to go take care of it. We have all had those. And then you just start sitting there thinking, I really wish I hadn't checked my email because you're gonna spend all night worrying about something that probably isn't that big of a deal in the long run, but that is.
putting you back into that stress cycle. You might be afraid you'll lose your job if you aren't productive enough or don't look like you're available enough. But think about that for a second. Who is that good for? Who does that work for? Our friend, the patriarchy. The men, the white men who created the workplace norms that still exist
mostly had wives that stayed home if they were married and handled everything there or they were single and the men weren't expected to participate in anything other than going to the job, getting drinks afterwards and coming home late at night. This norm no longer works for anyone, especially as our workplaces have become these lightning fast decision trees thanks to technology advances.
The ability to be available 24 seven is very convenient as well as horrible. So what do you do? You set a boundary, start small again, start small if you're worried and see how it goes. Try one week of not answering emails or teams or Slack messages after your work hours and tell everybody that you're doing this. Tell them why you're preserving your time with your family or
you're preserving your time for yourself or for your hobby or whatever it is you do outside of work, you don't need to tell them, but you get to preserve that. You have the permission to do that. Encourage your team to do the same and do not break your own boundary because as soon as you break it, everything will come back in. Even if you think, it's just this one time.
And I want you to hear this. It's highly unlikely that anything is gonna fall apart in the meantime. And if it does, then to me, that sounds like a workplace that has too much work to do and too few staff members. And it's working its people really hard if it's expecting them to sit through eight hours of meetings and then go home and work more at night to get caught up.
You know, I've talked to one of my clients about this who was worried because they couldn't get to the end of their inbox and they're a high level manager. And I said to them, you know what, you are never going to get there. You are never going to empty your inbox. Once you reach a certain level in the organization, that inbox is not your friend. And with Teams and Slack, it's even worse. And text messaging. So we have so many ways of getting in touch with people. So you have to keep
that boundary clear. And if everybody is depending on you so much that you couldn't possibly not answer your phone at night because it might let someone else down, unless you have a very specific job like the CMO, you are not that important. So think about that. And I don't wanna say that to make you feel like you're not important. Of course you're important and I love you, but you don't.
have to keep all of that importance with you when you go home. You can leave it at the office. And it's OK to do this. And yet we keep doing it. So that's why I'm here, to remind you that you can set these boundaries. And let's look at our last. So let's look at the next boundary area that I want to talk to you about. And this is about how to keep those boundaries at work.
Wasting time in unproductive meetings is the worst. And we have all done it. In fact, probably every day we might have an unproductive meeting because it's the weekly check-in or our monthly check-in with so and so, or a meeting to talk about a meeting before a meeting, which I've had plenty of in my time. it's the worst. Have you ever added up how much a meeting might be costing?
the company based on everyone's salaries who are sitting around the table. And it's depressing that all of these people are in this room talking about something that they're gonna talk about again and talk about again, and they don't really know what's going on and who's on first and who's leading the meeting. It's exhausting, right? I joked after the Barbie movie came out that my job was meeting, just like Ken's was beach, which was funny and also kind of depressing.
So here are some ways to right size your meeting, set some boundaries around your meetings to make sure they're worth having. First, and this is one of my three challenges to you, I want you to decline or delete three meetings every week.
First, and here's one of my challenges to you, decline or delete one meeting every week. Now, don't do this with your one-on-ones that your staff need. Do it for new projects or anything that isn't time sensitive or something that doesn't seem like it has an agenda or purpose because that a lot of time can be a complete time suck. When it all feels time sensitive, something's wrong because we can't be on
green light for everything at all times. So see if you can get clarification from your leadership on what to spend time on.
When you're in a meeting, put down your phone and laptop and ask your meeting mates to do the same or for them to not look at Teams, Slack, email, notifications, et cetera, if they're taking notes on their laptop.
you're gonna get a ton more done when everyone is focused rather than spacing out. Multitasking is a complete myth. And it's so funny, because it's on my resume that I'm a great multitasker. We actually can't do that. We're very bad at it. So even if you think, and you know this friends, you know this, if you are answering email while you're in a meeting, it is very hard to keep up with the conversation. And you usually just pretend that that's what you're doing. Unless you're a genius and can do it fabulous, most of us can't.
You're going to get a ton.
And finally, when we're talking about how to make meetings less of a time suck, you know those recurring meetings like management team or your weekly staff meetings, set it up so it's really clear who's responsible for creating the agenda and how it's created and set some rules for yourself. Like if you don't get in an agenda and related materials the day before the meeting, you don't have it the next day.
Or you can always use the Amazon trick. I hate that I'm quoting Amazon here, but you can use the Amazon trick of having at the top of every meeting, everyone gets a brief from the person who is running the meeting and everyone sits around that table together and reads it. So no one can say they haven't read it. You don't start the meeting without everybody being on the same page, literally, and you get a second to pull yourself together and know why you're in a meeting before you're in that meeting.
It's a good trick.
A lot of these times, these meetings, and I'm telling you this because I have done this as a boss, these meetings are a brain dump for leaders, which can usually be done in an email. you know, leaders, I have a lot of empathy for that because I have lived that life too. And it's because my life was so full of meetings that I couldn't even have time to sit and think through the strategy of who I needed to do what and why and when. So I would just be like,
grabbing people in the hall or on Teams, hey, can we talk? And sort of verbally exploding all of the things that I was thinking through with them. This isn't great. It's a lot of burden to put on your employees and you're not thinking straight. So this is where all of these tips that we've talked about today can come into play. You have your hour in the morning or at the end of the day.
to collect your thoughts and do some of the actual work. You have spaces in between each meeting, so you are not doing meetings in a row. Another way you can look at that is you will not do more than X number of meetings a day. I think three is probably good. And then finally, when you're in meetings, you're running them with a hygiene that allows them to be really efficient for everybody in them and everybody has the understanding of the purpose why they're there.
And if they don't, you don't have them. You don't waste your time. So there you go. Three examples of where you might not be protecting your boundaries at work and three tips on how to right size that. I would love to hear what's working for you. So I'd love to hear if anyone has any other ideas or what's working for you or if you think these are terrible ideas and will never work for you, tell me about it because I want us to have the conversation and see where we can get.
to a place where you do not have to work this hard in your workplace. So I'd love to hear what's working or not working for you. Please share in the comments what tips keep you from overworking. And if you're enjoying hard at work, I'd love it if you'd hit that subscribe button so I can keep these coming your way. I would end.
and personal reviews really help this out. and personal reviews really help me out. So if you wanna go ahead and leave a personal review, you can do so at the pages landing page. You can do so at the podcast landing page, which we'll have a link to in the show notes. So thank you again for joining me for another episode of Hard at Work. I hope you enjoyed this and got some tips and tricks out of it. And I'm looking forward to seeing you next time.
