The Space In Between

You're listening to The Uppercase Life where we are recapturing the joy of being alive. I'm your host, Joseph Brewster. I like to do things. And over the years, I've learned to use calendaring to supercharge my ability to get those things done. Things that I really care about. And I can do more now in a day than the 20 year old version of me could have even imagined.
But there is a crucial part of my routine now that I didn't know how to do very well when I first began this journey of trying to optimize my time. When you look at a calendar, it's usually laid out in chunks, whether that's months or weeks or days or hours. These chunks are theoretically about equal in length. So that one hour today is roughly the equivalent of one hour tomorrow.
Therefore, if I schedule a one hour meeting today at 1:00 and then a 30 minute meeting today at 3:00, I have an hour in between to do whatever I want, right? Like more meetings or run to the grocery store. But that's not how life actually works. Back to back obligations and filling every available time slot will not actually make you better at all those things you're trying to get done.
It might just do the opposite. And that's because an important part of why is time usage and an often overlooked part of it is margin. Margin is the amount by which one thing is separated from another. Think of it as the space in between. In publishing, the margin is the blank part of the page between the text and where the book is going to be cut.
If you don't have the proper amount of margin, the page cut begins to intersect with the text. So a narrow margin sometimes leads to this problem of what we call cutting it too close. We use this terminology in our daily life as well. We say that we were always late for something or we almost miss our bus. We were cutting it close.
If we often choose to be cutting it close. This can produce some unintended side effects, the most obvious of which is eventually you're going to miss that bus, or you're actually going to be late for a meeting. But even beyond that, there is a psychological and a mental strain related to an overly full schedule. The margin, it's this really blessed realm of grace where we can breathe, where we can go to the bathroom, where we can maybe read for a few minutes, talk to a friend or some other low impact endeavor that doesn't involve hard work or focused attention.
Sometimes margin protects us from unintended delays like traffic, for example, allowing us to sit back and relax in a traffic jam. Because we know that we had a little extra time to spare. So the next time that you're looking at that block of time, whether it's a day or an hour, make sure to imagine the margin there. Build it into the plans that you make because it's up to you to properly regulate your movements and your commitments throughout your day.
If you try to cram every good opportunity or even every urgent work request in your life, you may find yourself feeling frustrated and bitter. You may find yourself blaming your boss, your family, or maybe even just the world in general for your feelings of fatigue and stress. But the truth is, you get to choose those things, and you got to make sure that you're setting your boundaries and creating your margin, because that's your responsible party and not theirs.
So I'm asking you, are you creating appropriate margin in your life? If not, find ways to create that margin. And when you do, I think it's going to be time well spent. Thank you for joining me on the show today. I'd love to hear how you choose to use your margin and you can send me an email at [email protected] with your thoughts, comments, ideas and if this has been helpful for you, consider sharing it with a friend or if you're feeling extra generous, leave a rating on the podcast store.
And until next time. Live like it matters.