I can’t rearrange the hours in the day. I can’t rearrange the minutes in an hour.

What I can choose is what and how much I do, and the mindset with which I do it. There’s yet another piece of time/life management that affects how my week plays out which involves the process of scheduling.

What I’m getting at here is an aspect of “time management” that typically doesn’t show up in productivity books, namely, your mental attitude when scheduling.

For example, last night I was trying to schedule a trip down to Roseville with a friend. It was late, I was tired. In front of me were all my goals for the upcoming week, though I hadn’t woven them into my schedule yet (typically something I do on Sunday and last night was Friday). I’ve got big stuff coming up: finish and copy brochure for upcoming workshop (want that done “yesterday”), big client project to prepare for by Thursday, article to write for the newsletter by Wednesday, not to mention a number of other projects to move along, other appointments, general business maintenance, and geez, can I eat and hang out at all in there?!?

So last night I was feeling pressured by, what felt like, a gazillion things to do, and a friend who doesn’t feel the pressure of flexible-schedule & wear-all-hats self-employment. I could feel myself starting to get wound up as my head frantically looked at the page-a-week paper representing Jan 14 - 20. I already have several appointments over the weekend, too. A voice in my head was shouting, “how are you going to get everything done? Pack it in! You can do it!” The room started spinning, my breath got shallow, Ack! Finally I asked my friend, “can we talk about this tomorrow?” (I’ve written about using a night of sleep as a buffer for community involvement requests, but it’s useful in other situations, as well!)

It’s now tomorrow. Phew. After a good night’s sleep, and a short meditation, I feel back to center. Thinking about my scheduling for the upcoming week, the first thing that comes to mind is the question, “How do I want the week to play out?” Of course I can’t predict what will happen. However, I have been through enough weeks in my life as a business owner to have a pretty good sense of what over-scheduling means for me. And now that I have calm on my side I can choose how I want to set myself up for the week. Running from the get go? Or with more flex-time for these projects plus a little time for myself?

It isn’t a textbook answer. There isn’t a perfect ratio rule of scheduled to flex time. What I have is an inner sense of what’s acceptable vs. what’s too much. I also have the ability to consider an opportunity, and decide if it fits in with what’s “acceptable” to me (in this case it doesn’t) and then look at the rest of my schedule and see if there are workable trade-offs that I’d be willing to make (in this case there are) in order to maintain a level of scheduled activity that I feel good about.

Remember that having “too much to do” is often a function of over-scheduling. My over-active brain likes to forget that it had any part in loading on the responsibilities at some time in the past.

One of my strategies for preventing this is to check in with the quality of my headspace when scheduling. If over-active brain is at the helm, I know to be really careful about what I say yes to, and am often, as above, better off deferring a decision.