Setting email boundaries with Taylor Elyse Morrison
Taylor Elyse Morrison is the founder of Inner Workout, a program designed to help people build sustainable habits around self care. Its core practise is built on the five yogic dimensions of wellbeing and includes movement, breath work, journaling, meditation and flow. Its community supports people along their way.
Born out of what Taylor has described as a personal tendency to the workaholic, she started her business out of Chicago with a mission to help other people develop the skillset to take care of themselves.
Today that remains at the heart of what Inner Workout does, but she says the bigger picture of her work is about changing the narrative around wellness itself.
“People are tired of what I call “wellness as usual”, which centres on people who look a certain way, who have a certain amount of disposable income and who have a certain body type. Everyone else either needs to assimilate into that or can’t have access to being well,” says Taylor.
“I see a lot of how we structure our offerings and who’s represented in our offerings as a way to say, ‘Hey, all of us deserve to be well, you’re welcome to enter into this conversation’. We also want to make people feel comfortable being the expert on themselves.”
When I talk to Taylor she’s hot off a Kickstarter campaign for Instead, a deck of cards that you can pick up when your focus starts to wander. Instead of clicking onto Twitter or scrolling through Instagram, a card might tell you to take a moment to breathe deeply or find your heart beat in your chest. It’s designed to help you re-centre.
With all that in mind I was excited to sit down (kind of) with Taylor and talk about her approach to focus and her working day. Settle in for our latest Tempo Community Conversation as Taylor talks about recalibrating her definition of productivity around pleasure, creating boundaries for emails and what a good day’s work feels like to her.
When do you do your best work?
A good day’s work starts before work when I feel I’ve invested in myself. I love having slow mornings where I can get up, meditate, walk my dog, work out, journal and don’t feel rushed to get to the computer right away. That’s certainly not every morning but it’s starting to be more often than not that I have time for at least some of those.
From there I can get into the day’s work. I try to block my calendar ahead of time so I know what projects I’m working on and try and give myself at least an hour to get into them.
At the end of the day, on my best days, I feel that I got to put some really focused work into a specific project and saw the needle move. Even if it’s from point A to A.i. But it’s like, Okay! Something actually happened here.
I like being able to enjoy my evenings and read or hang out with my husband. Those are good days.
Are there any particular conditions, perhaps physical, that you create for focus?
Physical conditions, I don’t think are quite as important. I’ve written proposals from the bathtub before.
It’s a lot about what I’m not engaging with. I’m putting things on that lock me out of all of the other websites so that I can only have the task at hand, the ability to research and nothing else. It’s having my Tempo on so that I can’t check email.
What apps to do you use for that?
I use an app called Self-Control on Mac. I don’t get quite as distracted on my phone anymore, but when I did there’s an app called Focus Lock and it locks all your apps out so you can only use your phone as a phone.
Those are some tools that I use but it’s a lot of getting stuff out of the way, so I can just be present.
What do you think about ‘productivity’?
I’m really trying to figure out what my relationship to productivity is.
I am working on centring pleasure more than productivity because we’re not machines and productivity that focuses so much on output and progress loses some of the beauty of the present moment. Yes, there are things that I want to accomplish and there are outside constraints that sometimes merit a certain timeline, but I don’t want to be so focused on my output that I lose sight of what I’m building.
I don’t call my to do list, to do list. I call it the “get to-do” list because it’s a gift that I get to do this work.
Being able to sit in the pleasure of all the work that I’m doing, rather than ‘I need to check all these boxes’ gets me into a different mindset that supports my work even more.
How do communications fit into your day and how do you manage them?
I have someone who is the first line of defence to emails that come in to Inner Workout, but I still get a fair amount in my inbox. I have it set up so that I check my email or it comes in through Tempo three or four times a day and that’s a good clip. I do use the VIP threads so that if something’s important, it can come through. I’m also navigating how to be a supportive colleague for people who are international and also have email boundaries.
I tend to get back to people within 48 hours. My team knows that if it’s not urgent they can email me. If there’s a fire that needs to be put out, then they’ll message me in real time. That’s how we prioritise.
They have that type of access to me and everyone else I try and funnel to email. If someone DMs me on Instagram or messages me on LinkedIn I try and get it to be an email because I’ll lose everything else. Email is the point of access that I want people to have so I can manage it. It can just be a lot of people coming at you from different directions.
Do you think a lot about response times?
I have thought about how better to communicate business-wise what my expectations are. Like an autoresponder or footer saying “I will get back to you in 24 to 48 hours”. I want to be timely but also just because you want something in a hurry doesn’t mean that I have to now be in a hurry.
Being a black woman founder means sometimes people do things on their schedule but pretend like it is to my benefit. And I feel like it is a boundary that I can set when I am not immediately catering to their needs. There can be a lot of things, especially around February, which in the United States is Black History Month, or last year there was a lot of things happening with the uprisings and conversations around race. People were emailing me and sending DMs: ‘I want to partner with you, but I want to partner with you like tomorrow. And I need all these assets now’ . It’s very abrasive.
I try as much as possible to create boundaries and space so that I’m in control of when I check things, which is why I love using Tempo. I literally do not see your email until the time I decide, unless you’re in the VIP thread or unless you’re someone who has access to me in a different way that I’ve granted you access.
The culture around communications in a company is often set from above. How do you make it a two way conversation?
I’ll start from like a leadership perspective because this literally just happened yesterday. We had our first team meeting as a small but mighty team of three. And one of the first things we did in that meeting was go around and talk about how we like to work and how we like to communicate.
For example I shared that I only use text as an absolute emergency. I think that your personal phone should get to be your personal phone.
Having that conversation means we all know how we prefer to talk and which the channels are that we use as a company. So it’s partly me setting it, but also letting them add colour where their own personality and preferences go within that.
What about if you’re the employee?
You can do the same thing. It’s tricky. I lead a boundaries workshop and we talk about this. I think it’s easiest at the beginning of the relationship when you’re first coming on to a team. Ask your boss how they like to be communicated with and then you can also say what works really well for you— framing it as this is how I’m able to give my best to help.
Doing it at the beginning of a relationship or at the beginning of a project or even if it’s in your performance review and it’s kind of the fresh start for the year, those are the easiest times to do it.
But a leader starting that conversation is so much more empowering to your employees — if you start that conversation rather than forcing them to do it on their own.
Do you still have bad habits that counteract focus work?
Yeah. We just finished a Kickstarter and I feel like that kick started, no pun intended, some of my bad habits again. I had gotten really good at not checking email all the time and then I started checking Kickstarter a lot and thinking I could sneak in and check my email.
I’m coming out [of that] now and I’m trying to rebuild my bad habits. Outside of Kickstarter throwing me off, I just notice a lot that when something gets difficult for me, I click to a tab to read something, whether it’s Twitter or whether it’s LinkedIn or something, to just give me information, because this is too hard.
Sounds relatable!
That’s partly why the Kickstarter that we did was for this stack called Instead. Instead of scrolling you pull a card from the deck and it has an activity or an affirmation or a prompt for you to engage with.
I love having the deck by me while I’m working. This one says, find your heartbeat. So instead of scrolling on Twitter, I could just take a second, feel my heart beating, get back into it and then realise, Okay, why am I avoiding writing this email?
Is there somewhere you get inspiration from when it comes to learning good working habits?
I adopt things and keep what works. I let go of what doesn’t. The idea of ‘eating the frog’ has worked for me in the past: doing the thing that I’m most afraid of. Then I’m like, oh that was really not that hard.
I’m also reading ‘The Fire Starter Sessions’ by Danielle LaPorte right now. She talks about the idea: ‘what if you did the most pleasurable thing first’? So now that’s something that I’m exploring and seeing where it leads me.
I really don’t like speaking in absolutes because I do believe so deeply that you can take in a lot of information, test it on yourself and see, okay, this works as is, or this works in this situation for me or this doesn’t work for me at all. All of that is valid.
That’s how I like to approach things rather than, ‘you have to follow this five step process every day’, because again, we’re not machines. It doesn’t work that way.
Tempo is the email client that helps you focus. If you have a unique way of approaching productivity, we’d love to hear from you.
