Inside the Tank construction zone: boundaries (part 1)

Meet one of the stars who inspired us

Hey again - happy Friday!

In my intro, I mentioned boundaries, priorities, and energy. Those are the three things we’re building Tank to help manage, so in these next few posts I’m going to tell some stories to explain why, and share the sticky-tape-and-string first versions of the tools we’re building.

So - let’s start with boundaries, and a story with a happy ending:

Steph, always ahead of the curve

I first heard what a star player Steph was well before I met her. High-energy, smart, super-organised, great with clients and the rest of her team - the blueprint for what you hope for in a graduate hire.

Fast forward through 18 months of opting in to the most challenging engagements on offer, Steph made the call to opt out of consulting for good, exhausted. She took some time to rest, recover and reconsider what was really important to her. For her, a fast-track career came second to time with her fiance (now husband - congrats Steph!) and family. She made the move back to regional NSW where she grew up, and joined a local legal practice. Two years later she’s still a star player, but completely on her own terms. She’s thriving.

Steph is one of the people who inspired Tank - not because she needs it now, but because we’re both convinced the process she went through didn’t have to be as hard as it was.

Take a look at what she did: she made time to rest and carefully consider the things in her life that really bring her joy. She looked hard at her work hours and what they were causing her to miss out on. Maybe most difficult of all, she resisted the gravitational pull of what we think of as a “good job” - and what’s required to do it well.

In the process, Steph has turned herself into a Jedi master of boundaries. She sets expectations with her current team and clients based on the hours she’s prepared to work - and weathers the occasional disappointed response. She doesn’t have work email set up on her phone, and doesn’t give her mobile number to clients. She doesn’t check email or answer the phone when she’s focusing on specific tasks. And when she leaves work to go to the gym, see a friend, or head home to hang with her husband, she’s done for the day. Work starts again in the morning.

Like I said: Jedi.

Not everything in the Steph toolkit will work for everyone. The point of sharing her story isn’t to give you a blueprint, it’s this: a lot of what she’s doing now, she could have been doing before. She might still have made the same decision, but she’d have skipped the exhaustion, and the time and effort to work out a) that boundaries are a thing, and b) how to build them.

Boundaries are the first part of what Tank is about. Tomorrow, I’ll share v0.0 of what we’ve been building to make them easier to manage.