SMALL

from D1

“How much time I was losing to responding constantly to those outside influences!” says Pattantyus, owner of Spark Life International.

Pattantyus sets other limits. She lives in Lisbon, Portugal, but her clients are five to eight hours behind her in the U.S. If she has clients on Pacific time, they’re in the early part of their work day as Pattantyus nears the end of hers. She shuts her computer down at 7 p.m. her time. Clients know that’s the rule when they sign on with her.

Kelley Weaver’s company, Melrose Public Relations, is in Santa Monica, California, but she’s in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where her husband is in graduate school. Her employees start their days three hours after hers begins, raising the possibility of an extended string of texts and emails encroaching on her evening.

Weaver uses the Slack messaging system with her staff for group and individual conversations that eliminate the stopand-start rhythm of emails and texts. She also strives to go off-duty technologically at the day’s end; she silences her phone and tries not to look at it.

“When we go to dinner, I’ll leave it home,” Weaver says. But it’s not always easy: “Part of it is second nature and breaking habits,” she says.

Aaron Norris says he’s slowly gotten rid of his laptop at home for work after finding he was reading emails at 5:30 a.m. and spending time in the evening sorting through emails that he estimates were 80 percent spam. Norris, a vice president at his family’s Riverside, California-based real estate business, The Norris Group, has also cut back on time spent on email at work and no longer tries to read every social media channel.

“There has to be some peace or I just feel frayed

by the end of the day,” he says.

Josh Nolan began putting a boundary between work and personal life — his own and his staffers’ — about three years after his website design company, Bold Array, was founded. He was working over 100 hours a week as he and his staff of five tried to keep up with clients’ questions, requests, emails and texts.

“Things were getting a little difficult to manage,” says Nolan, whose company is based in Costa Mesa, California.

His solution: Clients are told Nolan will answer emails, phone calls and have meetings between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. He’ll answer texts and emails after 10 p.m. or the next day, keeping evenings clear. Weekend work is billed at a higher rate.

“Once we started setting those limits and communicating expectations, it helped with company morale and not just going insane with the amount of work,” he says.