Protecting your downtime — Belinda Morgan

Welcome to another Flexible Success newsletter. Each edition includes a tip, a quote, a question and an interesting read - all related to flexible work. It's designed to be quick and easy to digest, and to provide you with some food for thought for the week ahead.

A TIP

These days work has a nasty habit of creeping into the times of the week when we are not supposed to be working. This is true for everyone, and can be an especially tricky problem for those of us working part-time.

When we have nothing mapped out in our calendars for our non-work days, it can be easy to start letting work commitments slip into this time, even when we know we have a ton of things we'd rather do instead.

A simple hack for avoiding this is to plan out your non-work days in your calendar. This includes scheduling in activities that don’t need to be done at any set time, like going for a walk or calling a friend for a chat.

Once you have this visual representation of how you will ideally spend your day, you can clearly see what you are saying no to when you say yes to that additional work activity. And when the opportunity cost is more visible, you’re much more likely to think twice about booking work activities over the top of these things.

A QUOTE

'Half the troubles of this life can be traced to saying yes too quickly and not saying no soon enough' – Josh Billings

A QUESTION (OR TWO!)

How much do you let work creep into your time off? What's the opportunity cost of this?

AN INTERESTING READ

It's R U OK? Day today, so perfect timing to share this article from the R U OK? organisation with helpful tips on how to stop work creeping into the rest of your life.

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