Words Lauren McKimm, Founder, Eclective Coworking
This morning I emptied the dishwasher when I should have been answering emails. Which would have been fine, except putting away one mug somehow became wiping the crumbs out of the cutlery drawer and standing in my kitchen at 10:23 a.m. wondering why we own 17 reusable water bottles and only three matching lids.
This is the dangerous beauty of working for yourself.
I have always thought I needed freedom to do my best work. My brain does not move in a particularly straight line. Sometimes an idea gets stuck in it and I cannot leave it alone until I have sketched it, googled it, sent the email and followed the lead. I am Alice, long gone down the rabbit hole, and occasionally someone needs to send a search party.
I know I will get the important work done. I always do. Sometimes elegantly, but sometimes by the skin of my teeth. What has surprised me is how differently I work when I leave my house.
Nobody is supervising me. Nobody cares whether I finish the spreadsheet or spend 40 minutes investigating something completely unrelated. But everyone around me made a decision that morning to show up and work. And somehow, I do too.
I don’t scroll aimlessly through my phone. A personal call suddenly requires me to get up and go somewhere else, and that tiny inconvenience is often enough to make me think, I’ll call back later.
Nobody is watching me, exactly. But I am being seen.
I used to think that kind of accountability was something I wanted to escape. Now I wonder if some of the inconveniences we have worked so hard to remove were doing more for us than we realized. The commute said: work starts here, and ends here. Getting dressed was a small declaration of intent. Other people, even people we barely knew, reminded us that work involved actual humans.
That last one feels increasingly important.
Lately I catch myself halfway through a beautifully polished report wondering whether the person who sent it has actually read it. Emails arrive immaculate. Proposals sound thoughtful and strategic. Everyone suddenly has perfect grammar and an uncanny fondness for the phrase “moving forward.”
And I find myself missing the rough edges. I have always understood people through them. Their humour. Their hesitation. The strange way they phrase something. The moment they say: “I actually don’t know.” Those things told me who was on the other side.
Now it can feel as though we are slowly outsourcing the human part of work while somehow leaving each other responsible for receiving it. Maybe that is why the disappearing boundaries bother me more than I expected.
At home, every version of me is available all the time. Founder. Boss. Manager. Mother. Friend. Creative person. The dishwasher is right there. So are the emails. I can do everything whenever I want, and increasingly I am realizing that “whenever” has a cost.
Because when every version of you is available at once, none of them gets all of you.
Maybe some boundaries were never barriers. Maybe they were how we knew who we were supposed to be for
a little while.
