In nearly thirty years of work, I have heard it argued, in many different ways, that being permanently available is a sign of professionalism. That commitment is measured by how fast you answer emails, messages, and calls, regardless of your role and regardless of what those emails, messages, and calls actually contain.
It is not true. Unless what you do saves lives.
Professional boundaries, limits, conditions – call them what you like – exist to protect the quality of the work. If you are self-employed, they are also a strategic tool. And if you are in a leadership role, they can be uncomfortable, which is precisely why they deserve attention.
The idea that limits are necessary is by now reasonably widespread. What tends to be harder is working out how to put them into practice. So I have gathered here some plain indications to start from, for people who work for themselves and for people who work inside an organization, including those managing other people.
It starts with estimating time
Before I take on any commitment, I always make a realistic estimate of how long the work will take. Not the ideal scenario where everything runs smoothly, but the one that includes revisions and feedback, to-and-fro with whoever commissioned the work, any unforeseen changes, and my own mental recovery time.
I often get this wrong and underestimate the effort, so over the years I have learned to add twenty or thirty per cent depending on the case. The more a project excites me, the more I add, because I might have easily judged it with heart eyes.
As a freelancer, that estimate becomes the basis for my rates, deadlines, and contractual conditions. If a client wants the timeline compressed, the price goes up. If they want 24/7 availability, I am evidently not the right person. Within an organization, the price lever might not exist, but scope does: if the deadline is short, something has to give, and you need to decide what to give and write it down straight away.
A time estimate also involves examining the conditions in which that time will be spent. How likely I am to be interrupted, and how often; how many times I will have to switch between tasks; how much social interaction the project requires, bearing in mind that to compensate for it I need to plan recovery time.
I do not track all of my hours. Apart from projects billed on actuals, I assess a good part of the work by muscle memory, the kind you build over nearly thirty years, and the list of things completed is a more reliable record than any timesheet. When I feel there are inefficiencies and want to fact-check that feeling, I bring out Toggl. I describe the rest of my system for holding my days together in How to organize freelance work without losing your head.
Three kinds of boundaries, to be guarded accordingly
Not all boundaries are the same. Each kind protects a specific function and deserves to be handled accordingly.
Availability boundaries concern when you can be contacted. I answer emails only during working hours, and my work phone is reachable only during specific windows.
Interruption boundaries concern when you are available for real-time interaction. Some days I hold no meetings, and I protect parts of the day with focus time in Google Calendar and Apple’s focus filters. Here, anyone in a position of responsibility has leverage I don’t: a good share of the meetings filling your days were probably called by you. Halving the standard duration, taking yourself off invitations where you are not essential, and canceling the weekly catch-up that has existed since 2019 are three decisions nobody will challenge, and they give you hours back.
Load limits are perhaps the hardest to guard, at least for me. I try to stop myself from taking on new tasks or assignments sight unseen, even within an already underway project. I am not brilliant at restraint, but knowing I have to try is a good first step. For a while now, I have taken at least half a day to consider a new request. In that half day I submit context and information to a Claude project I built for the purpose: it asks me questions I should be asking myself with a clear head, the ones I skip when I am in a hurry, and it weighs my answers knowing what I have already committed to.
How to communicate your limits
Let us start with the assumption that a limit you haven’t communicated yet doesn’t exist. Even if you think your behaviour makes it obvious. For limits to be defensible, they have to be explicit, which is why you need to state them clearly to the people you work with.
My system for doing that is simple. I write my limits into contracts, I put them in my email signature, I state them explicitly while negotiating, and I repeat them in out-of-office messages, which I also use when I am deep at work on a project that keeps me from attending to anything else, not only when I am on holiday.
But the form of communication that works best is sticking to your limits consistently. It works even better if, while respecting your own limits, you also commit to not infringing on them for other people. If you ask not to be contacted outside working hours and then send emails at eleven pm, you have just telegraphed that the rule applies to you and to everyone else. You can certainly compose an email when it suits you, but schedule it to send later.
If you lead people, your limits are shared
This is the point where boundaries stop being an exclusively personal matter.
A freelancer who defends a limit risks losing a client. Someone with hierarchical power, by defending a limit, grants and withdraws permission for everyone around them. It is the part of the role that rarely comes up in job descriptions, and the one that the people working with you will notice more than anything you say in a meeting.
It works the other way round too, which is why unspoken boundaries are more dangerous than badly stated ones. People who do not make the boundaries explicit leave them to be inferred, and others usually infer generously. Your email at eleven pm is received as in implicit request, and they feel forced to reply.
But reciprocity also means asking the people you manage what their own limits are. In a conversation, once, and then taking account of it when you distribute the work, showing that you listened.
If you are not the one setting the terms
Everything I jave written so far evidently assumes some room to manoeuvre. Not everyone has it in equal measure: it depends on the contract, the role, the industry, and on who sits above you.
Even with narrow margins, though, there are moves that require nobody’s permission:
- stating a channel, for instance “when I have my hadphones on, please send me an email”
- stating a frequency to manage expectations, for instance “on the days I work on the report I check my inbox three times only”
- using the tools already at your disposal: your status on Slack and Teams, calendar blocks, silenced notifications, scheduled emails
- answering “I will look at it tomorrow morning” insteaf of “ok” when a request lands at the end of the day. It costs the same effort and builds different expectations.
Then there are the limits you have to negotiate with whoever has the power to grant them: availability outside working hours, the right not to attend a recurrnig meeting, the workload when a new project arrives while the previous two are still open. In those cases, the move I have seen work best is to offer a choice rather than making a request (or worse, a complaint). For example: “if this project comes in, one of these two has to move, tell me which”. That way your limit becomes an easy decision for whoever is in charge, who can make the assessment that belongs to them.
Before starting any of those conversation, take the time to reread your contract, your staff handbook, and any collective agreement that covers you. Some of the limits you think you have to win for yourself may already be written down somewhere, even if nobody has ever bothered to tell you.
There is a difference between beeing flexible and being always on
I have been writing about limits for a thousand words, and you are maybe starting to think I am an inflexible person? The impression is wrong. I am the first to make exceptions and to adjust a working relationship in any number of factors: the more someone shows they have understood my limits and do not abuse the exceptions, the more willing I am to renogatiate them.
But “being flexible” means adapting a framework when it is really necessary, not being permanently on alert. Being always on means creating a constant and unncessary cognitive load, one that prevents you from preserving the energy you need to hold a standard of quality in your work.
Saying no to a project that does not fit frees the time and the energy for what actually matters, and that is something I explored at leangth in Planning to live.
Ideas and possibilities can look infinite. My energy and yours are very finite. If we spend more of it than we had accounted for, we take it from something else, and usually we take it from whatever has no external deadline.
In my experience, collaborators and clients appreciate the transparency and the assertiveness of someone who states their conditions. But what they appreicate most is the level of excellence you reach when you defend those conditions.
