7. Create your “whole life.” It is easy to get caught up in your professional life and identity, and its pressures, and to forget the other parts of you. These tactics so far handle your work life, to allow for your other time. Use similar tactics to defend this private time:

a. Set up end-times for each day’s work, and actually walk away from your desk, even if you are moving from one room in your house to another.

b. Manage your clients’ expectations for reasonable schedules for deliverables.

c. Book time away for a week or more, as many times as you need, and make it clear to your clients that you are “off the grid” and cannot be reached. This can be done, and respected. Stick to it once you set it up.

Now comes the real challenge: expanding or maintaining your identity to include non-work time with non-work experiences. This may be fun, friends, partners, family, reading a junk book, creative work, travel, community involvement… you know, your “real life.”

The next discipline is in your mind – to become a full person, to do the work when you are working, and to be your whole self when you are not, and to slip back and forth easily and joyfully between all the selves you are.

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