Work-life balance in the corporate world is a delicate line between maintaining one’s self and keeping up with an office workload. One woman on TikTok says she unintentionally created healthy work boundaries simply by taking the company she worked for at its word.
Posted by @.scribbage, the video shows her talking about the boundaries she created by interpreting her company’s descriptions of things literally, such as a lunch hour. It has been viewed more than 265,000 times.
@.scribbage might have unlocked a cheat code #corporate #9to5grind #work #workfromhome #fyp ♬ original sound – don’t call me that
“I just realized that when I was working in a corporate job I set really good, healthy work-life balance boundaries just by literally being naive enough to think that the company meant what it said, so I took a full 60-minute lunch hour every day,” she says. “It was work from home. I didn’t even ask. I was like, it’s a lunch hour, you said I should have a lunch hour, I’m taking it.”
Not everyone took this approach, @.scribbage said. A few months into working there, she says she received an email from a coworker announcing that they would be setting a hard boundary around their 30-minute lunch, to prevent further burnout.
“Then a couple months in I got this email from a coworker talking about how she was taking a step back for her mental health and was so burnt out, and now would officially be sectioning off 30 minutes every day for lunch that she would not allow meetings and would not compromise,” she explains.
“I was literally taking walks every day,” the TikToker continues. “I never worked past five, I literally would just be like, well I’m out of time today, but I can do that in the morning.”
Some viewers shared that they implemented similar boundaries with work, to great personal benefit.
“This is what changed it all for me,” one commenter wrote. “My pay is the same, so I can relax a bit.”
“Literally,” another commenter wrote. “Everybody at my office jokes that I’m straight out the door at 5 pm, like yeah… that’s kind of the point?”
“I have been saying this for so long,” a commenter wrote. “A work life balance will not be handed to you. You have to make sure you take it.”
The Daily Dot has reached out to @.scribbage via TikTok comment, as other methods of contact were unavailable.
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