It's my birthday this week!
Which means a few things: It means cake. It means a slightly inappropriate amount of red wine on a weeknight. It means my mom calling to sing me happy birthday even though I've asked her not to. (I love it. Keep singing, Mom.)
It also means I'm going to do the thing I do every year on my birthday:
Reflect way too hard on what the last year actually looked like.
And this year, the reflection landed on something I've been wanting to write about: my complicated, slightly chaotic, genuinely happy relationship with OOO.
For some people, OOO is sacred. It's the firmly-set autoresponder, the laptop tucked away in a drawer, the two weeks in Europe with zero Slack notifications.
For others, OOO isn't even a phrase they use. It's just "vacation." Or "the weekend." Or "after 6pm." The line between work and life is clean and obvious and protected.
And then there's me.
For me, OOO means "I went 24 hours without checking my email and that's a personal win we should celebrate."
It means my laptop stays charged in the hotel room. It means I'm answering a client message poolside while pretending I'm not. It means a "vacation" almost always has a working morning baked into it.
If you're horrified right now, I get it. There's a whole productivity-and-burnout corner of the internet that would read that paragraph and stage an intervention.
But here's the part I want to actually talk about.
I'm not bragging about being always-on. I'm not romanticizing burnout. I'm not the founder who posts "rise and grind" content at 4am with a green smoothie in hand.
I'm just being honest about something I've come to terms with:
The price of full autonomy is that the work doesn't stop. And I would never give up that autonomy.
I get to decide when I work. I get to decide how I work. I get to decide who I work with, what I say yes to, what I say no to, and what shape my days take.
That kind of freedom doesn't come without a tradeoff. And the tradeoff, at least for me, is that I'm never fully off.
I'm okay with that. Mostly.
Here's the thing nobody tells you about working for yourself, or running something you built:
The freedom is real. So is the work.
When you have full autonomy over your career, you also have full autonomy over your problems. There's no boss to escalate to. No company to absorb the weight of a hard quarter. No HR department to handle the awkward conversation.
It's you. Always you.
That sounds heavy when you write it out, but the strange truth is that it's also the part I love most. I'd rather have the weight of my own decisions than the lightness of someone else's plan. I'd rather work harder for something I believe in than coast through something I don't.
Freedom doesn't look like beaches and cocktails. It looks like answering one email from a beach so the cocktail can happen at all.
That's the real version. And nobody puts that on a motivational pillow, but they should.
Every year on my birthday, I run a kind of internal audit. I ask myself:
This year, the answers are: yes, yes, mostly, working on it, and absolutely.
The "working on it" answer is the most honest one. I'm getting better at protecting my time. I'm getting better at saying no. I'm getting better at noticing when I'm running on fumes and actually doing something about it.
But I'm not pretending I have it all figured out. I'm a 27 year old woman juggling a career I love, on a path I chose, and some weeks the work follows me into my Saturday. That's just what it is right now.
The trick, I'm learning, is making sure the Saturday work is the exception. Not the standard.
A few things I want to bring into my next year around the sun:
If I can go 24 hours without checking my email on a weekend, that counts. I'm not aiming for monastic levels of disconnection. I'm aiming for one full day where I'm a person, not a CMO. That's attainable.
Future Nina is allowed to take a trip where the laptop genuinely stays home. Not "stays in the hotel room." Not "stays in the bag, mostly." Home.
We're working up to it. This year, my laptop is going international alongside me.
A spontaneous hike with the dog. A new restaurant I've been wanting to try. A concert ticket I almost didn't buy because the show is on a Wednesday. The point of building this life is to live it, not just to maintain it.
This one's important. Because for all my talk about boundaries, I genuinely love what I do. There are weeks where I'm fired up and want to work on a Sunday morning with a coffee and a good playlist. That's not failure. That's a gift.
The goal isn't zero work outside work hours. The goal is choosing it on purpose.
Here's where I've landed, on this birthday, with a slice of cake in my future and one more lap around the sun behind me:
OOO isn't a status. It's a permission slip. And we get to write our own.
For some people, that permission slip looks like two weeks in another country with no service. For others, it looks like turning off Slack at 5pm and not opening it again until morning. For me, it looks like a slow Saturday with my dog, a true crime podcast, a half-answered email, and absolutely no guilt about any of it.
There's no right way to do this. There's only your way.
And the longer I do this, the more I realize that the goal isn't to have a perfect work-life balance. The goal is to build a life and a career that don't require you to escape from each other.
I'm not all the way there yet. But I'm closer than I was last birthday. And I'll be closer next year.
That's the win.
Cheers, Off the Record. See you when I'm one year wiser.
Until next time, Nina
📚 Currently reading: Onyx Storm
🎧 Currently listening to: Two Friends
🍷 Currently sipping: An expensive glass of Cabernet (it's my birthday, I'm allowed)