Is defining the borders necessary or rude?

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Rola Khaleda, FT editor, chooses her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.

In the first days of an obsession with Ebay, an aggressive comic message is often added to the description of the elements offered for sale: No please.

What’s all this? I said to myself. It looks a little. At that time, I was less trembling and overrun. “Matti Chillax!” The old muttered me, at a confusion of the defensive and delightful tone of these harassment sellers.

Almost at the same time, during the FT News Room, I was surprised by a colleague to do something similar personally. In the face of the progress of the conversation of a miraculous colleague telling him some problems, he simply rejected the approach.

“I just don’t have a frequency range,” he said firmly. He actually held his hand to raise them and continue his work. Wow, I thought. Rob to be ruthless but effective – and perhaps very mentioned, too.

Recently, I was thinking about how Miranda interacted yesterday. I noticed how others firmly set the border. He shocked me as rude. But I failed to see him, he was addressing the phenomenon that it is wise to protect yourself from: things that take your time when you don’t have enough of them.

Now it differs. Email messages and SMS messages, since those innocent times, joined by WhatsApp groups and Social media The notifications that make maintain the top a job Marathon messages around the clock. The care of the elderly parents has created a tsunami from the supervisor, on which my children’s school accumulated in a large meal of crazy applications to communicate, separately, everything from homework tasks to vaccinations and absence.

Everything is tremendous. I am not alone. A recent survey found that the British were spent 1.52 billion hours as a nation On the supervisor, every year, he burns a great hole in our productive time – not to mention our speedy exhaustion as well.

More affected by middle -aged women – perhaps because we take care of women on behalf of young and old. Does it make me feel better in knowing that I am in my typical steady? Perhaps not – I am not sure that there is safety in the numbers if it indicates the hours of time you spend in this nonsense. To quote Peter Vinci in network: I am angry at hell and I will not take this anymore.

What is the solution? according to Cal Nioport And other prophets to restore your resources for what matters, it is better to stop everything. Simply cancel the subscription – from the whole emails, social media, and digital interda. Perhaps setting a message bounce, but not to read any of them. Life is waiting for you to live in, and work also needs to stumble properly, without deviations.

Most of us, however, it does not have the luxury of disappearance until one day. It is impossible to log in truly to social media suggestions on how to manage a swollen email. What about Weekly voting To choose one who gets a response, is the rest deleted? If only!

But there is a better approach. It has succeeded for me for a few years, until the digital attack was collected. Simply do what is urgent. Learn how to distinguish things that actually need your attention, and deal with them immediately. I would like to recommend this to the tyranny of the tasks lists, as medium -term tasks become horrific psychological burdens.

In the news industry, this is the rule. Follow now, make this phone call, write the dreaded thing down, find the information and pass it. Then move to the next task. When people hang in the news room, it is unusually annoying. More than that, it seems to be insulting – hence my colleague refuses to participate over those past years.

And who has worse than ethics in this exchange, really? This is something I returned to. Now, I think the border setting is completely necessary. This does not mean that I will dare tell a workshop that I do not have the frequency range, not the least of which is that women are expected to be more beautiful.

But I will definitely be less thinking about others. There is no further expectation to respond to the meaningless messages, such as those that I sent to the editor of this column with the ridiculous joke about the email -mail polling cards. There is nothing wrong with sharing a little lifting on working day. But there is no mistake in ignoring it. As I did wisely. “No, please!”

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