Co-Authored By Lizabeth Roemer, Ph.D. and Josh Bartok, M.S.
We wrote over the summer about the ways that expanding your awareness and your thinking can help you thrive amid sociopolitical and personal stress and offered suggestions for practices that can help you cultivate spaciousness. However, one significant barrier to cultivating spaciousness of mind is an absence of space in our schedules.
There are, of course, many demands on our time: more tasks at work than our scheduled workday can fit, child- and other family-care responsibilities, a relentless bombardment of many sources of information that demand our attention, and countless other values-based or necessity-based activities that can easily fill each day. Moreover, many people have to work multiple jobs, take unreliable and slow public transportation or walk, and lack child-care support that others have.
On top of these demands, we often receive societal messages that suggest that being busy is a sign of importance, that doing is more valuable than being, and that one’s worth is capitalistically tied to one’s productivity. These messages can lead us to fill our schedules even more than external demands require, leaving us with very little time to take a step back and reflect on how things are going, take stock of our emotional reactions, consider possibilities, or identify changes we want to make.
This demanding context can leave us feeling like we are barely keeping up with our lives and that we have little agency over how we spend our time. These tips may help.
Refrain from filling every hour of your schedule
For those of you who are lucky enough to have some control over aspects of your schedule (the meetings you schedule at work, the number of tasks you agree to, the additional responsibilities you take on), take the time to be intentional about what you schedule and what you agree to. It is easy to look at your calendar and see any openings as times you are “available.” However, downtime is necessary for uptime.
Some open time in your schedule is necessary for you to thrive in your work, your relationships, and your personal growth. Unscheduled time is not, in fact, “available”—in an important way it’s already spoken for. Try to find ways to protect some open time so that you can breathe, reflect, and make non-reactive choices about your life.
It’s helpful to even go so far as to mark off open times on your calendar to protect them for these important activities. You might choose 15-, 30-, or 60-minute blocks, depending on what works best in your life. And when a meeting or other commitment is canceled or runs short, consider this an opportunity for you to cultivate spaciousness, rather than rushing to fill in that time with additional obligations or tasks.
Schedule regular check-ins with yourself
In addition to scheduling regular open times that allow you to naturally cultivate spaciousness, you can also intentionally check in with yourself to see whether you have enough space in your days (or weeks, or months). Consider putting a check-in time on your calendar every one to three months or so in which you intentionally consider how the rhythm of your life is going, whether you are spending time in ways you would like, and specifically whether you have enough space in which to reflect, consider alternatives, and make choices about how you are spending your time. If not, try to find some small ways to make this time in your current context.
Pause before saying yes
Our aspirational contributions to work, family, and community often exceed our de facto capacity. When considering your true capacity, recognize that it includes your emotional capacity, your energy level, your physical health, and the rest of what may be going on in your life.
So when you receive requests or opportunities, or you develop your own ideas of projects you want to take on, first pause to consider your capacity in your current context—your life as it actually is right now, not as it was last month, or how you wish it were. And when trying to discern how much time a new task might take, rather than imagining what it would be like if everything goes right, imagine things going wrong. Ask what you can give up in order to fit this new responsibility in your life. Consider what you will end up giving up if you don’t make an intentional choice. And then decide from this more fully informed perspective, rather than assenting from the entrenched habit energies of people-pleasing.
Notice and consider what nourishes you and what drains you
We all have obligations and responsibilities that drain us—but we can’t only engage in activities that drain us, because we will eventually diminish our capacity to do anything at all. Pay attention to the activities you engage in that leave you feeling more spacious, more connected, and more energized, and make sure you are making space for those too. They are, in a very real way, also utterly essential.
As you begin to create more space in your daily life, revisit our suggestions for cultivating spacious awareness and spacious thinking.
Josh Bartok is a contemplative photographer and life coach, and the author of two children’s books.
