Stepping Away.

This last Saturday night I found myself returning an email to a client at 10:45 at night. I sent my response, we watched the movie we rented and while Ryan let the dogs out for the last time for the evening – I clicked my icon and my design client had returned my email and I clicked “reply”.

Before I got too many sentences in, I stopped and thought to myself, 

“What the hell am I doing? It’s 12:45 am and I’m responding to an email?? What is wrong with me? There is nothing that pertinent that I need to respond right now.”
And although I felt like I was slacking I closed out of my mail app, and proceeded to bed.

Sunday morning I woke up and checked my emails like I do every morning, and that email and another I had received stared at me making me feel guilty that I they were missing a response. I thought about the fact that I have sent many emails and had to wait for a response for 24-72 hours regularly. And although I’m a stickler about emails and making sure I give an unbelievably fast response time,
I gave myself permission to take the entire day off.

No emails, no Twitter.

I’m a habitual “email icon clicker” and having unread messages on my screen bugs me – so even clicking and reading them I decided I was going to make it all wait until Monday.
It was going to be just fine, the world would still go ’round.

I don’t work on actual work Sundays, and usually the most I do on Saturdays is Tweet out about the link-up for small business and return emails – but I usually don’t work on any other tangible work or blog stuff unless Ryan is working or has something else going on.

So I decided its my goal to make myself realize emails can be received and go unanswered for more than a couple hours, it OK to step away for the weekend like most businesses do – to take a break; because the truth is emails are still work at the end of the day, and responding the next day is OK. It doesn’t make me any less of a person or business woman, but it makes me a better wife and will make me a better mother to set those perimeters now while I can soak up the last weekends of quiet moments with Ryan, just the two of us because ultimately that’s where my priorities should lie – with my husband, while he is home the two days a week he is. He deserves that much. And once baby A arrives – those two are going to hold the top spots on my priority list.

So, it’s better that right now I learned to teach myself that it’s OK to step away, because it is.