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The Dev Health OS

Cerebral Calisthenics 4

Boundary Setting

For more details about burnout prevention and work boundaries, refer to SECTION 2: DISCOVERING OURSELVES in the DHOS manual.

To prevent burnout, it’s important to internalize that work should only be one part of our lives – an important part, but just one piece of a greater whole. Our actions and decisions throughout our lives carry with us. If we burn ourselves out in our early twenties, we risk lifelong repercussions from those experiences. They may show up in the form of physical ailments like heart conditions and ulcers or mental health issues and trauma that persist for decades.

The consequences of unhealthy habits can be unpredictable. To put it bluntly, a good thing for us can never be built upon a bad thing for us.

Ignoring work-life balance accrues like technical debt. At some point in our lives, we will need to pay down that debt before the system becomes completely unusable. In retrospect, we can look at the history of our decisions and actions as line items on a balance sheet that brings us to the present day. What debt on the physical body do we need to compensate for exercise or physical therapy? What debt on our mental health do we need to pay down with counseling or medication? The tradeoffs toward our health debt seem worth it at the time, but when we take a moment to reflect, investigate, and be curious about our present mental and physical states, we need to be honest about whether previous work-life tradeoffs have resulted in an overall net gain.

CC 4.1: Technical Debt of Life. Do you have debt?

Take a moment and ask yourself these questions and assess whether you have a debt mindset around career advancement:

  • Do you believe that the present work-life trade-offs will be worth it in the long run?
  • Does this mindset seem sustainable?
  • Is there a clear end in sight?
  • If so, are you sure that is really the end?
  • What makes it different from where you are now?
  • What does it give you that you can’t get any other way?
  • Can you increase the margin around tasks in your life to find more contentment while progressing?
  • What other aspects of your life are you putting your career ahead of?

CC 4.2: Setting your Top, Middle, and Bottom Lines

Now that you understand your mindset, it’s time to clearly define and commit to a starting place for our boundaries. Setting boundaries is crucial to maintaining our personal well-being and avoiding burnout at work and at home. We suggest using the following three categories to decide boundaries. You can read more about setting your top, middle, and bottom lines in SECTION 2 of the DHOS manual.

Bottom Lines
This is the starting point. This is where we make an agreement with ourselves about our non-negotiables and guard these at all costs. If we break these boundaries, we’re out of balance and potentially heading towards work addiction. Be careful not to pick too many bottom lines. Only focus on the most important things.

Middle Lines
This is the gray area. If these boundaries break, it indicates to us that we are headed in the wrong direction. They are signals or warning signs.

Top Lines
These are the areas we ultimately want to focus on. These are the habits we want to do regularly. Living in our top lines keeps us removed from our bottom line behaviors.

Take some time to set your boundaries!

Bottom Line
Middle Line
Top Line












CC 4.3: Aligning your priorities and time

Now that we have discussed boundaries and potentially started implementing a few, we can discuss allocating the time we regained to other areas. We want to match the most important things in our lives with what we spend the most time on. Where discrepancies are revealed, we can work on reallocating time.

Let’s do a simple time assessment:

  1. Identify the top 5 most important areas of your life. List them out in order of priority. (e.g., (1) mental health/self-care (2) family (3) work (4) friends (5) my favorite hobby)
  2. What amount of time are you spending each day in each area?
  3. Does the amount of time spent on each area correspond with their priority? If not, what adjustments would you make?

CC 4.4: Finding Our Identity Outside of Work

This section’s purpose is to pause and think about how we can be unproductive. How can we “waste time”? What can we do for ourselves that doesn’t relate to our careers? If all things were equal, what are three things you want to do or that you miss from childhood? Could you buy a Lego set right now and make time this Sunday to build it? Could you dust off your guitar today and spend an hour learning a few notes or chords online? Could you open a bottle of wine, even a cheap one, and search for tasting techniques online?

  1. List three hobbies or activities you’ve always wanted to explore that are unrelated to work.
  2. Pick the easiest one to start and add it to your calendar when you can begin the exploration process. Start the process and decide later if you want it to be a regular part of your life.

CC 4.5 Create Your Daily Action Plan

Now that we have our Essentialism Plan to see the higher level scope of our upcoming work, and you understand the significance of being able to substitute, under-schedule, play, and pause, we can drill down our goals to create a Daily Action Plan. See Section 2: USING THE TOOLS in the DHOS for more information.

The Daily Action plan consists of the to-do’s that are necessary to complete the initiatives from the Essentialism Plan. This is where we write things such as emailing colleagues, working on bug fixes, attending meetings, and so on.

This plan can be designed however works best for you to accomplish your goals and keep you on task. The list can be completely free form like a grocery list, or it can look like a schedule where items are designated to be worked on at a specific time. Famously, Bill Gates created a Daily Action Plan that accounts for every 5 minutes in his day.

Don’t forget when creating your Daily Action Plan to give yourself time to take breaks, eat lunch, and respond to the occasional “off-topic” work chats that connect us to our coworkers!

Here is an example of a Daily Action Plan, but again, please feel welcome to design it however works best for you!

Date: February 18


09:00 - 09:45  Respond to unread emails and messages
09:45 - 09:55  Take a break, get up and stretch
09:55 - 10:40  Work on bug fix for ticket #RM-837
10:40 - 10:55  Prepare for product demo
10:55 - 11:00  Take a quick break before demo
11:00 - 12:00  Product demo meeting
12:00 - 13:00  Lunch
13:00 - 17:00  Cont Bug fix for ticket #RM-837


Bonus: Feature request #RM-925

Reducing Internal and External Pressure

We face a list of internal and external pressures from the moment we start work each day. As we advocate for slowing down at work, it’s important to begin identifying which pressures are artificial and which are real so you can put things in perspective and prioritize your daily agendas.

More often than not, the root of artificial pressure is fear-based thinking. These can be intrusive thoughts telling us that if we don’t complete a task, something negative will happen as a consequence. For example, we fear missing a deadline because it may compromise the next round of funding or fear that failing to finish one task will lead to getting fired.

CC 4.6 Is your place Workaholic or People-First?

While not an exhaustive list, the following describes what you’re likely to experience at a workaholic workplace vs. a people-first environment. How many people-first characteristics do you recognize in your current job? Are there ways that you can drive positive change?

A workaholic workplace is:

  • Consumed by an artificial pressure loop where fear, instead of purpose, drives decision-making.
  • Growth is pressed for the sake of growth.
  • Employees feel like they have little to no agency, and their opinions have little weight.
  • Work capacity estimations are misaligned with reality, and time is greatly mismanaged.
  • The sole concern is production by whatever means necessary, which promotes plate-spinning over purposeful execution.

People-First workplaces include:

  • Asynchronous communication: In a people-first organization, live chat and urgent requests are the exception, not the norm.
  • Deep Work: The people-first organization promotes meaningful, focused work over busy work.
  • Diverse and Inclusive: The people-first organization promotes a culture that gives all employees the opportunity to contribute and participate equitably in the workplace.
  • Flexible Schedules: In a people-first organization, employees have the agency to mold their schedule to accommodate and recognize the complexity and unpredictability of life. This allows them to work without the worry of failing to fulfill outside responsibilities.
  • Outcome-Oriented: The people-first organization has clearly outlined shared goals and objectives with reasonable targets and measurable results.
  • Professional development opportunities: The people-first organization invests in its employees and encourages and supports efforts to learn and improve through regular 1-on-1s, career planning, peer reviews, and structured feedback.
  • Remote work: The people-first organization understands that the work completed is more important than the location of the team doing the work.
  • Sensible hours: In a people-first organization, rest is built into the culture with employees and the leadership team leveraging appropriate scheduling boundaries.