Finding a Balance Between Structure and Flexibility
Just rolling with it to find a better balance to give myself space to do things easier.
Part of just rolling with it to me is to relax the rigidity of structure that I’ve created in my life over the years. I think I’ve created this structure to provide myself with some feeling of perceived control in certain areas of my life, along with the assurance that if I stick to the structure, I might, just might, be able to get everything done that I want to get done.
I’ve also told myself that if the structure is established once, I don’t have to spend time and energy recreating it each day. Over time, this structure, in its different shapes and forms, feels like it has rapidly emerged from a lattice providing flexible structure and guidance to a rigid and confining steel cage. Doing things a little bit easier means to do them with more flexibility, to reduce the stress I increasingly feel from being trapped in and struggling against the cage of this structure.
Most of this structure recently has manifested itself to me in the form of my schedule. The stress I feel as a result of my schedule feels like it is being caused proportionally by the immediacy of the schedule. The more immediate the schedule, such as a a daily schedule, the more stress it causes me. I do feel some stress from weekly, monthly, yearly and lifetime schedules, however this stress feels proportionally lighter as the time-frame get longer.
I originally planned my day on a daily basis, the night before if I had the energy left at the end of the day to do that, or the morning of, if I didn’t do it the night before. From what I’ve read, scheduling is a very mental resource-intensive activity, if not one of the most resource intensive activities that most of us have to perform on a regular basis. As a result, most of the advice I’ve read suggests setting a schedule the night before the next day or first thing in the morning, before we start getting pulled into a million directions.
Setting my schedule on a daily basis worked for me for a while, however it started to become unmanageable for me as time progressed. Despite trying to compartmentalize my thinking about the daily schedule to specific times during the day, I found myself running through various scenarios throughout the course of the day, trying to play each one out in my mind to determine which scenario would be the optimal one.
While I feel very fortunate to have a very flexible schedule, in this case the flexibility was a contributor to the stress that was beginning to build related to setting my schedule for each day. Because the flexibility allowed me to experiment with many different scenarios, I felt compelled to figure out the perfect scenario for each day. As a result, I burned through a significant amount of mental resources chasing these perfect scenarios.
In addition to chasing these ideal scenarios on a daily basis, another contributor to the stress that was turning the lattice into the steel cage was trying to schedule something into each and every block of time in my schedule. If you looked at a visual representation of my schedule at the time, you would have seen a jigsaw puzzle of multi-colored blocks stacked up without a break for the majority of the day. Just looking at this visual representation of my day began to be a source of stress.
I’m in a place now where I’m experimenting with finding the right balance between establishing enough of a structured schedule for my day, while preventing the schedule itself from becoming too oppressive and restrictive, essentially adding to the stress that I hope it can actually alleviate. That’s the balance I’m looking to strike.
There are some things that seem to be working along these lines so far -
1 — I’ve been able to determine a solid and consistent work schedule for each day of the week. The schedule is pretty similar M-F, however I’ve adjusted it slightly to adapt each day to other responsibilities that occur on a regular basis on the same day. The schedule for individual days then repeats each week. For example, my schedule each Monday is the same, while Tuesday may be slightly different than Monday, however looks the same for each Tuesday. I then establish the recurring work schedule in my calendar, essentially forming the foundation for the rest of my schedule.
2 — I also scaled back the block of time during the day I actually track in my calendar, by not blocking-out what I’m doing every single minute before and after work. For example, I do keep my weekly yoga class on the calendar, however I don’t have a recurring event for walking the dog every morning.
3 — Breaks in the work day are represented by breaks in my calendar, as blank spaces, rather than blocks representing those breaks. I do strongly believe that taking breaks is essential to doing your best work. By not explicitly representing them as blocks in my calendar, they actually feel like breaks. This also gives me more flexibility to do what I feel is most important with that break time, rather than schedule in what I think will be most important to do when that time comes.
These initial steps seem to be working for me. Setting a consistent work schedule as the foundation of my schedule has greatly reduced the amount of time and energy I spent on trying to optimize my schedule each day. (Setting my work schedule first probably also says something very telling about my priorities, which I’ll probably explore in later posts!)
Scaling back the block of time that I track in my schedule helps me ease into and out of the day, rather than feel like I need to jump out of bed and into the first scheduled block of time at the beginning of the day, then out of the last block of time and into bed at the end of the day.
Finally, the visual representations of free space in the calendar really help me enter into the mindset of actually taking a break, rather than rushing into the next thing that I want or need to do. Not pre-scheduling activities into those break times allows me to do what feels right at the time, giving me space to be aware of what feels right and mindful of the conscious choice to follow that feeling. As a result of these changes, I do feel that I’m slowly moving toward a better balance between structure and flexibility.