Do you have enough white space in your life?

I had an interview with a journalist on Monday and we had a fabulous chat about all things time management.

During the interview I touched on the concept of white space. She seemed to like that so we spoke about it quite a bit.

I feel it’s essential to have “white space” in our lives. For me, white space is room to breathe. Something that seems to be so lacking in many of our lives.

If you’re feeling frazzled and overwhelmed, check to see how much white space you have in the following three areas of your life.

 

Dullstroom Lake – April 2011

 

 

1. Travel/ commuting time

Leave a little bit of extra time when you need to get anywhere so that you’re not constantly rushing. Also, it helps to have some breathing room if you suddenly find you need to fill up with petrol (gas) or if there’s a traffic jam.

Stress is not fun so rather take some reading or work (if you must) with you to use up any time if you don’t like to “waste” time. Although my friend, Beth Dargis, has taught me to also just enjoy being and not doing all the time 🙂

2. Daily scheduling

Don’t schedule all your appointments back to back. Some of you are saying, “but Marcia, don’t you always talk about batching?” Yes, I do.

If you do some batching, give yourself a solid break after doing a couple of phone calls/ emails/ etc. E.g. If you’re on the phone from 9 – 12, leave some white space and start another type of activity after an hour or so. And so if you run over with the phone calls, you’re not stressed and anxious going into the next activity or group of tasks, feeling like you’re already behind.

3. Weekends

I know weekends are the time to catch up on things but please, leave some breathing time.

Don’t schedule something for morning, afternoon and evening. Even two activities a day feels like too much. We have a personal family boundary of only one social per weekend day, and preferably only one per weekend, although it somehow doesn’t feel like an extra social if we go somewhere directly from church 🙂

I am also guilty of having a to-do list of 20 items for the weekend which…. never gets all done. But I do schedule lots of down time to get things like reading, sorting out my house and weekly meal planning done.

Over to you.

Can you think of an area or two where you can build in some more white space?

If you need some help, book a Success Strategy Session with me.

 

 

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Comments

  1. That is a great post. Thanks for sharing this kind of post with.

  2. My mid-morning coffee. Regardless of whether I make it myself at home, whether I buy a take-away and take it back to work or sit in a cafe to sip it, I always make sure that I whereever I am or whatever I am doing, I stop and sip and savour every last mouthful. I guess it helps that I drink tall latte’s – it allows for that little extra white space in my mornings.

  3. Hi Marcia,

    I recently linked back to you in a post that i did about 30 days of “giving away stuff”.
    Here’s the link:
    http://www.love-and-lollipops.blogspot.com/2012/03/30-day-give-away-challenge.html

    Love the white space idea. I am a big culprit of not planning any white space in my life and then just taking some when it’s not very convenient, because I’m stressed out. Then I feel like I’m “opting out/bailing out” and feel quite guilty about it. Poor planning, I know!

    Thanks for always challenging me!

    Georgia

  4. oops my name is still linked to my old blog address in the previous comment. Have fixed the link here.

    Georgia 🙂

  5. This is a great concept, I love it!!

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