Set Boundaries

If you are a hard charger, but don't want to burn out or wreck your family, you need to set reasonable boundaries. If you don't set your own boundaries, no one will set them for you. Do you want to be available 24/7 365 days a year? You will be if you let yourself be. I recommend working harder and even longer than your peers. But just as important, I recommend unplugging and making yourself unavailable during personal and family time. If you shut off during dinner time with your family, vacation and weekends when you're not working, you will perform better at work. You will also have a happier family life and gain the respect of people at your company and others in the business community.

As you hold yourself out as someone who is generous with your time, helpful and who is willing to make meaningful introductions to your network, there will be no end to the people who will place demands on your time. However, if you don’t set boundaries, you will become overwhelmed with a job that never ends. Start by carving out your family and personal time. Protect your weekends, holidays, vacations and family dinner nights. I am not saying never to have a business dinner or business event over the weekend, but I am saying that it should be the exception, not the rule. You will find that co-workers, customers and others in the business community will respect your boundaries and respect you for keeping them even if they do not. It is similar to respecting someone’s discipline to stick to a diet or exercise regimen even if you don't.

After you have protected your family and personal time, you need to protect your follow up time. This really takes discipline. If you don’t do it, though, you will be doing your follow up during the family and personal time you were planning to protect. I used to do exactly what I am warning you against. I would attend several evening events in the same week that ended pretty late. I would come back to the office to do follow-up after those events very late at night and then be back up the following morning for 7am events. I would regularly do this several nights and mornings back to back to the point that I was burning out. It took me a while to figure it out but, over time, I realized that it was not necessary and actually counter-productive.

The best investment advice I've ever received was from someone who had spent over a decade learning from his own mistakes what works and what does not. I benefited from their mistakes and lessons learned. While I am not much of an investing guru, I have made a few mistakes and learned from them when it comes to networking. The realization that I needed to start working on boundaries followed an extended season of early morning and late night events and meetings that caused me to burn out. During a much-needed vacation to Key West with my wife, I did not want to come back. I picked up an application for a job that required driving a golf cart on the beach around the island during normal business hours. My wife talked me out of filing the application. However, it was at that point I decided it was time for a change.

It was at this point in my work life that I began to realize that I needed to set boundaries. I began to limit myself to two evening events and two morning events in one week and never scheduling and evening and a morning events back to back. Following that decision, my family life was much happier and my personal life was much more balanced. Over time, we started setting a family dinner time which we followed with a devotional at the dinner table. Since I was now home more times than I was away, I had to let my family know what evenings I couldn't be home. Those years of family dinners were some of the most precious memories my kids have of growing up in our home. With proper boundaries, you will be a better networker and a more-friendly person to get to know. Once you have figured out how to protect your family, personal and follow up time, it is important to start to do better time management.

Early on, I would get many phone calls throughout the day. At first, I answered my phone every time it rang until I realized that if I continued this practice, I would not have time to do anything else throughout the day. As my days got busier, I would let my calls go into voicemail or be answered by a receptionist. I would return the important ones as soon as I could, and return the other calls during my drive home. Naturally, I would not reach everyone who had called me, but would get credit for returning the call. I also got very good at leaving long, thoughtful voicemails.

Over time, more people began to use their cell phones as their primary business line, making my old practices somewhat obsolete. Today, most of my communication is done via email and the only, non-family phone calls I do are scheduled ones. Because the email volume is so heavy, I set time at the end of every work day to reply to the urgent emails, and I set aside Mondays and Fridays for outreach and follow up. That is when I reply to the non-urgent emails and make promised introductions. This is what works for me in the type of job I have. You need to figure out what works for you. Set your boundaries and rules and stick to them the best you can.

Keep in mind that you don’t need to advertise your boundaries and rules to your contacts. However, if you are fortunate enough to have a scheduling assistant, make sure that person knows your rules and boundaries very well and helps you stick to them. An excellent scheduling assistant will also know when to ask you if you are willing to make an exception to one of your rules. When scheduling, remember that you set the rules for your calendar. Just because someone says they want to meet with you on a certain day or have breakfast or lunch with you, it does not mean that you need to do exactly what that person had proposed. There are times that breakfast or lunch make sense as you are trying to develop relationships and build your network. At some point, you may reach a stage where your lunches are booked two months out. At that point, you need to reserve those lunch meetings for important relationships you are trying to build.

A rule of thumb I use for setting meetings is that if I am trying to get a meeting with someone, I always come through a good introduction from a mutual contact and I offer to come to them. Typically, I will give the other person the option of meeting for lunch, but to be respectful of their time and lower the chance of a rejection, I will offer to swing by their office at their convenience. Interestingly, with this approach I have had many take me up on the lunch offer and have very few completely turn me down. When someone is trying to meet me, I will typically have them come to my office.

Every meeting does not need to be an hour long. My meeting scheduling times range from a five-minute phone call to an hour-long meeting, depending on what we are trying to accomplish. By default, most of my meetings are a half-hour long and my calls are scheduled for 15 minutes. It took me a while to figure this out, but if I did not figure out a system, I would not be able to accommodate the people who wanted to see or talk with me. Without a system, I would never have time to proactively try get to know others. Without going into detail on what type of call or meeting I schedule in each scenario, I will just say that over time try to ascertain if an hour-long lunch is warranted or would a half hour meeting or ten-minute phone call suffice. You will become a much more efficient networker if you reserve the hour-long lunches to use strategically and schedule as many shorter calls and meetings whenever possible.

You will also need to establish boundaries for your valuable contacts if you want them to value your referrals. If you are connected with CEOs of successful companies, venture capitalists or celebrities, many of your other contacts and friends will try to get to them through you. If you send every service provider you meet to those valuable contacts, they will stop taking your calls and emails. When someone requests an introduction, first ask yourself if the person on the other end of the introduction will value it or be annoyed by it. It took me almost a decade to figure this out. What I recommend is that if you know the introduction would not be appreciated, carefully weigh how important it is to the person requesting it and how badly you want to do a favor for that person. Then reach out to the contact being sought and ask them if they would be open to the introduction. If yes, you are a hero. If not, respect their wishes and kindly let the other person know that they are not open to an introduction at this time. Do not forward their email to the person requesting the introduction. Over time, you will develop a knack for knowing when an introduction would be welcome or not. However, if there is any doubt, always seek permission.

Another little tool that I have found to be a helpful time saver, is the forwardable email. If you are networking and making meaningful connections as I have suggested, you will be creating a lot of work for yourself. One of the more time intensive tasks is composing thoughtful emails to make meaningful connections. Lately, I have gotten very good at instructing individuals who would like an introduction to one of my contacts, to send me a forwardable email that I may use in the introduction. The forwardable email is written to you, not the person you are reaching out to on their behalf, but it is written for the sole purpose of being forwarded to the other person. Make sure to tell them to attach their resume or business proposal. Sometimes this works great and you get exactly what you need thus making the introduction effortless. However, at other times, your contacts will just not understand the concept and you will need to call or email them to explain what you meant.

One other boundary I suggest you set for yourself is what you will allow yourself to eat and drink. If you are out and about at business networking events, you will have endless opportunities to consume hors d'oeuvres and alcoholic beverages. I did this and enjoyed it for a while until I gained 40 pounds and started to have to buy larger clothes each year. When I finally decided that continuing to gain weight was not acceptable, I began to set boundaries in this area as well. In the same way that you must control your schedule, only you can control what goes into your mouth. I am not prescribing a diet plan, but keep in mind that you do not have to eat dessert every time it is served or consume alcohol just because you are at a cocktail event. Personally, I avoid dessert and most carbs and limit the alcohol. I lost that 40 pounds and am much happier having fairly strict boundaries for what I am willing to eat and drink at networking events and on business travel.

If you set your own reasonable boundaries, you will be happier, healthier and better at what you do. If you rely on others to set your boundaries, you will be ineffective at your work, will have no family life and no time to exercise. The more control you have over your schedule, the more time you will have for important customers, follow up and the people who are most precious to you.