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Summary
Marie Kondo took the world by storm with her book, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and a simple question: “Does this spark joy?”
In this podcast, we’re going to apply the same approach to cleaning up our calendars and schedules, so that we can create a bit of breathing room and start loving our days again.
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Marie Kondo took the world by storm with her book, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up and follow up book, Spark Joy. All this talk about Marie Kondo got me thinking that the same principles that she shares for tidying up our homes can be applied to our calendars.
If you’re like many of us and you overestimate your energy level and time commitments, if you feel like your days are controlled by other people, if you’re starting to feel burned out, or if you’re multi-passionate and love to cram as much into your day as you possibly can, this exercise is worth your time.
The KonMari Method is Marie Kondo’s method of organizing, which encourages tidying by category rather than location, reviewing one category at a time, and only keeping those things that “spark joy”. The magical thing about this process is that you consolidate what you own to make space for the things you really love, the things that bring you joy. You can open a drawer or a door and see all your favorite things.
Here’s how to do the same thing for your schedule.
Steps 1 & 2: Dump and Sort
Write down everything that you’ve been spending time on. How do you spend a typical day? If your days aren’t typical, how did you spend your last 24 hours? Make sure you include the time you’re spending on your phone and other electronic devices. Set a limit and look at what makes sense for you. Maybe for you reviewing the past week and looking a week ahead is sufficient. If you’re schedule is extremely varied, maybe look a month back and a month ahead.
Get it all out of your head and onto a piece of paper. If you’ve already completed a time audit, or you have a very detailed calendar already, this should be easy. If you’re tech-nerdy, you can even export your calendar to Excel, color code your projects and create pretty graphs.
This is the calendar equivalent of taking everything out of your closet to look at it. It can be a bit overwhelming when we step back to see it. So many of us cope with this by just not confronting it because we don’t want to deal with it, but that’s not going to serve you long term. If you have a very full calendar, this is where you’re going to divide and conquer.
Sort your projects and tasks. If you were clearing your closet, you might put skirts in one pile and dresses in another. Do the same for your schedule.
What are your work and professional commitments? What are your personal commitments? I highly suggest you evaluate them one at a time. Then break them down further. Categorize them as you see fit. What are your commitments for your family, for yourself, and for others? Maybe you’d like to break them up by area of life: spiritual, relationships, financial, or perhaps it makes more sense for you to categorize your actions by the goals and projects you’re working on.
Either method you choose, having your tasks in categories makes it easier to determine the usefulness of each task and also helps to you to see how balanced your efforts are. For example, you might see that you’re spending all your time and mental energy on professional pursuits, and not enough quality time nurturing relationships. If you’re a freelancer, you might notice that you’re spending more time on the ad hoc clients, and not enough time nurturing the clients that you love working with, the same clients that keep sending you referrals.
Step 3: Evaluate. Once you have it all out of your head, it’s time to go through them.
For each task, project, and appointment, ask yourself, “does this spark joy?”
Step 4: Decide
As you review your calendar, you’re going to create three virtual piles. If you’re doing this on paper, you can color code or make a list of each.
- Tasks and projects that bring you joy, serve you well, or support your goals- the things that you will keep and calendar
- Tasks and projects that don’t spark joy, serve you well, or support your goals, but you will tolerate for now. These are the actions and projects that need some thinking and planning to get out of.
- Tasks and projects that don’t spark joy, serve you well, or support your goals- the things that you can eliminate quickly
Ask yourself: “What am I going to do about it? Do I have a choice?”
Most us believe that we don’t have a choice, and there’s a heaviness, a burden, and no freedom in that. Recognize that you ALWAYS have a choice. You have a choice in whether or not to pay your taxes. You have a choice in caring for your children. Most of us would never consider otherwise, but know that you are making a choice- to improve your financial situation, to care and provide for your loved ones, or even to avoid the consequence of not doing it. There’s a sense of freedom in recognizing that some of our obligations are commitments that we chose intentionally.
If you want to love your life, you need to find a way to align the way you spend your time to the priorities in your life.
My grandmother always used to say, “a place for everything and everything in its place”. As part of the decision-making process, you need to find the right place in your schedule. Sometimes my clients go through this process and they’ll realize that they don’t have the right place for it yet. So they either have to make room for it by shifting things around or it has to sit in a virtual parking lot until they have the time, energy, and space in their calendars to give it their full attention.
Step 5: Celebrate & Keep It Going
Your final step is to schedule yourself a periodic review to make sure everything is lined up. For some this could be a simple annual review once a year when you set your goals, but for most of us, we need to look at them more often than that. A quarterly, monthly, or even weekly evaluation can help you set your priorities and align your efforts to your values and goals.
You did it! Do a happy dance! When you look at your calendar, give yourself time to celebrate and enjoy a little bit of breathing room before you start filling your schedule back up. How much were you able to eliminate? How do you feel? When is the last time you had some white space on your schedule?
Just like physical clutter though, calendar clutter is an ongoing threat. Each time someone asks you to do something, you might want to first ask yourself, will this spark joy?