How to Disconnect from Work

Struggling with burnout, boundaries, and asking for help? Listen to this conversation between an administrative and executive assistant on how they recharge and manage their workload as busy remote employees.

Recorded at EA Ignite Spring 2024 and produced by the American Society of Administrative Professionals - ASAP. Learn more and submit a listener question at asaporg.com/podcast.

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Leah Warwick: Hi, I’m Leah Warwick, and you're listening to "The Admin Edge." This episode was recorded at the American Society of Administrative Professionals (ASAP) event called EA Ignite, and features a conversation between two ASAP Advisory Board Members, Peyton Ticknor and Yesenia Hernandez-Brito. Reflecting on time management, which we explored with Ashley Whillans in the previous episode, Peyton and Yesenia have a frank discussion here about burnout and work/life balance. Take a listen.

Peyton Ticknor: Welcome to the, Yesenia.

Yesenia Hernandez-Brito: Thank you, Peyton.

Peyton Ticknor: All right, well, we're going to talk today about burnout, and we've got some questions that you can help answer and give our listeners some insight. The first thing is: What strategies do you use to effectively disconnect from work at the end of the day, ensuring that you have time to recharge?

00:01:05                     

Yesenia Hernandez-Brito: Well, this is a perfect question for me, since I am a virtual employee. It has been hard to disconnect from work. My office is at home, so it's not – I just don't shut down and get in my car and drive home. So, what I do is I specifically put it on the calendar, so I do a time block. 4:15 to 5:00 is shutdown mode, where I try to finish up any work from the day. I try to catch up on emails, respond to any requests, and then I try to just shut down. So 5:15 is my ultimate shutdown time. It doesn't always happen. Sometimes there are things that pop up, but that is how I try to manage my time effectively and shut down for the day.

00:01:55

When I go on vacation, I mute the notifications. That has been an amazing strategy to use. Just mute your Outlook. Mute your Teams. If you're not getting the constant pings, then you're not looking at your phone. 

Peyton Ticknor: I will say, I also am a remote employee, and what I have done is I don't have the notifications pop up on the notifications banner for Slack. We use Slack. I have that turned off. So, if I want to see what messages, I have to open the app and read the messages. So not getting those notifications on the notification banner helps for me. And then when we go on vacation, I just remove the app from my home screen. I don't delete the app, but I just remove it for that week so I don't even have the temptation to look at notifications. So that's really helped me to disconnect when I'm off the clock.

Yesenia Hernandez-Brito: As a virtual employee, do you ever feel guilty or that sense of panic, like, "I missed that email from three hours ago from my CEO"?

00:03:00                     

Peyton Ticknor: I do. Yes, I do, and I think I always will. But also, as administrative assistants, we're not saving lives, so I just look at it like, it'll get read when it gets read and it'll get addressed when it gets addressed, and everything's going to continue to move forward. I'm trying to train myself to get better about that, but, yeah, I do feel that guilt because, as an administrative assistant, we always strive to be on, and to answer people immediately and all of that. So, yeah, I do struggle with that, and I'm working on it.

Some advice that I've been given in the past from colleagues is "block your calendar every day, so if you have a hard 5:15 p.m. cutoff, block your calendar at 5:15 until the next day so it shows you're out of office, and then you can set that auto reply-back that you're out of office and that you'll reply as soon as you're back on in the morning, and then have your office hours. 

00:03:52

I've actually seen, in other colleagues' email signatures, that they have their office hours there at the bottom in their signature. They'll say like, "My office hours may not necessarily align with your office hours, so I don't expect you to reply immediately." I'm seeing that shift in the workplace and I appreciate [it]. I think that's something that's really great. I also have – every day when I log off, I will go and change my status on Slack to "out of office," and it'll say "be back online in the morning at 8:30 a.m." So, they know, "Okay, Peyton will back at 8:30," so they know that's when I should respond. I am really trying not to respond in those off hours, to help prevent the burnout. 

Yesenia Hernandez-Brito: Yes. With Teams, if I'm busy, if I want to just focus and want to make sure that I end the day at an acceptable time, 5:00 or 5:15, I do put "busy – do not disturb," or "away." I never put "out of office," but I do put "offline." That is when they know: do not disturb me.

00:05:01

I also see that with my colleagues, and I make sure I'm sensitive to sending them, because I know they might put "offline" and it's because they want to just disconnect, so I try not to send messages as well. I am the only one supporting the executive team, so most of the times, if I say no, it's not “No, not right now.” It’s "No, I can't do it." It's "No, not today. No, not tomorrow. How about Monday? Just give me a deadline of when do you need this." 

Peyton Ticknor: Absolutely, yeah. That was very similar to some of the advice and information that we received in the time management keynote this morning about how to say no and when to say no, and ways to work that in, because it's hard to say no.

Yesenia Hernandez-Brito: It is. And it's kind of a challenge because we want to grow. We want to be seen as strategic partners. When we are asking to be strategic partners, they're like, "Okay, then maybe you could handle this project."

00:06:03

You're like, "Okay, yes, but I don't have the time this week." It's something that you have to discuss with your executive team and kind of communicate with them. Have a partnership. I think they will respect you and have more boundaries and they'll appreciate the honesty. 

Peyton Ticknor: You're the only admin on your team, because you have a small team. Where I am, I have a team of 500+ admins in the company, and so sometimes, for me, if there's something that needs urgent attention and maybe I'm not there – and even this week, I'm out of the office, here at the event, so I delegate. It might not be what you know, but it's who you know. I have found that when there's something urgent or my workload is too much and I need help, throwing out a message to the team, like the entire admin team, "Does anybody have any bandwidth to help build this agenda for this candidate coming in for an interview?" I have five or six people raise their hands. I'm like, "Oh, my gosh. Thank you so much."

00:07:02

You don't have that opportunity where you are, but that's something that folks who work in a large company – there's probably somebody else that's waiting to help, or wants to help, and has that bandwidth. So always feel like you can delegate and ask for help. 

Yesenia Hernandez-Brito: I do have colleagues who are so gracious with their time. They know my workload, or they see the [tech] that I'm working on and they're like, "Oh, Yesenia, how are you managing the board and managing events and managing the executive team?" And they have offered to help. Sometimes I do say, "Oh, my goodness. Can you help me with a slide for this deck?" But then there's a sense of guilt because I know they are busy as well, and it's not their scope of work, right? It's something that I personally have to work on, asking for help.

00:07:50                     

Peyton Ticknor: You know, it might be good for them to flex their muscle in a different way as well. Yeah, it could be good. All right, well, let's go to the listener question. We had an anonymous admin write in: "I keep pointing out to my executives that I need to take things off of my plate. We just lost another admin in our department, so I keep inheriting work that I haven't agreed to. When I leave work at the end of the day, this is all I can think about. How can I disconnect from my job in my free time and voice the lack of backup I'm experiencing to my supervisor so that this does not continue to happen?"

Yesenia Hernandez-Brito: This, Peyton, has been a recurring theme at EA Ignite. I have had many one-on-ones. I had a brain date. This is all that I'm hearing. I think, for this person, she or he needs to be honest and sit down with her executive and let them know, "This is not what I signed up for." If you're not speaking up, if you're always saying, "Yes, I can manage this." Or, "Oh, I'll take her assignment until you to fill…" How long does this take to find someone else? It could take a year. It could take six months.

00:09:07                     

Peyton Ticknor: You say that this is a theme here at EA Ignite, but I was at APC in Vegas in the fall of 2023, and I heard this same exact theme. The piece of advice that I would offer is: Do a time audit. The admin needs to sit down and do a time audit of your day. What are you doing in a day, and how long is it taking to do each of these tasks? And then what are you doing in a week? And if you quantitate that and you put it into a pie chart or a bar chart, or even just a simple Excel file, starting with thirty minutes each in that eight-hour day, what you're doing and how long it's taking you to do it, and you bring that data and present it to your executive team, it's probably going to be a shock to them because they don't realize all the things that we're doing and how long it takes to do.

00:09:55

They might see that data and say, "You know what? We are going to hire another person," whether it be a part-time person or a full-time person, but they're going to see how much you're doing and how long it's taking, and that if they want to keep you and keep you happy and healthy in the role, they're going to have to bring in more help. What they might not know is if you keep saying yes and you keeping taking on that additional work, they have no idea that you're burned out. So like you said, be honest. Do that time audit. Sit down and have an honest conversation and show them the numbers and say, "Last week, I booked seven trips, and I did six expense reports, and I did seven agendas, and I did your calendar, I rescheduled 14 meetings…" Show them what you're doing and how long it's taking, and I think that might help justify bringing in an additional administrative person to help you. 

00:10:46                     

Yesenia Hernandez-Brito: And I also think that the executive team, or the team that you are supporting, they need to understand that an admin or EA – we specialize in different areas. Some companies have EAs that just do travel, or some calendar and travel, or are board managers and do events. Yes, we could do it all, right? They say admins rule the world. We could do it all, but we do not have the bandwidth. If you are spending half the day calendaring and then there's an event coming up, it takes a long time. Even if it's a small event, right? Then you're doing travel, and travel always changes. It always changes. "You have to change my flight." You're doing hotels and meals.

Peyton Ticknor: I don't know how many hours I've spent on the phone on hold with the airlines.

Yesenia Hernandez-Brito: Exactly, trying to change travel, and then you're trying to also do the budget, right? You're in charge of the department expenses. It's so many things that you're doing in a day that I have heard from other EAs – I've seen it all over LinkedIn – that you cannot have one EA doing fifty million things. You're not going to –

00:12:16

It's not going to work. If you're not utilizing your EA to the best of their potential, he or she is not going to grow. 

Peyton Ticknor: We block time for our executives to have think time and work time and all that. We, as executive assistants, need that same time back in our day to think about: What's next week? What's next month? What's next year? Some of these things take a lot of planning.

Yesenia Hernandez-Brito: I also want to point out that many executives, they see us [as] "Oh, that's my assistant, right?" We're people. We're real people that when we leave the office, usually – they have done a study that EAs are the people that also manage their household, right?

00:13:00

I may log off from work, and then I am managing my household. I'm making sure homework is done, dinner is done, and my kids are going to their sports. Was this appointment scheduled? We are 24 hours – managing professionally, managing personally. At the end of the day – 

Peyton Ticknor: We're going to burn out. We have to be honest with our executive and we have to block that time for ourselves.

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Leah Warwick: Thank you for listening to "The Admin Edge," produced by the American Society of Administrative Professionals. Original music and audio editing by Warwick Productions, with audio and video production at EA Ignite by 5Tool Productions. If you liked this podcast, please leave us a nice review and five stars wherever you listen to podcasts, and subscribe. If you'd like to submit a listener question, you can do so on our website at asaporg.com/podcast.