Lately I’ve been struggling to keep up with everything, and I end up dipping into time I had set aside for myself. Can you relate?
My suggestion to you (and to me) is to make sure your time is really your time. What I mean by this is to set the boundary that once you put time on the calendar for yourself, honor that. Especially honor the time you’ve set aside for fun, friends, family, self-care and relaxing. 

An easy-to-relate-to example is our vacations. I’m pretty good at “going dark” for my vacations, but sometimes that email on my phone sucks me in. What usually helps me is to use my vacation or “out of office” message as a trigger to my brain that I am no longer working until I come back and turn the message off.

What if we took this a step further and used the vacation or auto-responder message for other things, like an email-free day, once in awhile? What if we set the message to say that we are taking a day for reflection and deep thinking and will be checking email tomorrow? Would the world stop? For some professions, this may not be possible, but consider if you could do it for just a couple of hours instead of an entire day. Use that auto-responder message to trigger our brains to take time for ourselves. We’re setting expectations for others that we will get back to them and that we prioritize self-care and self-development.

And don’t forget to pay attention to how you feel after you take that time away from email, or even all technology. Are you rejuvenated? Would it be worth doing this regularly? You might be surprised!