Scheduling Time to Schedule Your Schedule

By Lisa Payne

Would you believe that one of the most needed, but rarely scheduled appointments is a massage? Why is it that with our desk calendars, smartphones and now, Alexa that we still can’t manage to schedule time for ourselves?

We can agree that there are non-negotiable priorities that include things like your job, family, savings, health care, your car, etc. These responsibilities will not likely go away anytime soon since they build the very foundation for our lives.

However, there are so many other facets of life that often take a back seat to bills and lawn-mowing. To live a more well-balanced life, it’s up to us to make other non-negotiable priorities like self-care, continuing education, travel, mental health and entertainment. These we’ll refer to as secondary non-negotiable priorities. They are just as important as primary priorities but they often fall to the wayside without more concentrated effort.

To do a better job scheduling these secondary non-negotiables, we first need to feel the weight of how important it is to schedule them.

Why?

· Create better work-to-life balance.

· Get a better understanding of what areas of your life are lacking.

· Time-management skills.

· Prevent boredom, anxiety and depression.

· Teach yourself to stop procrastinating.

· Build confidence and self-esteem.

· Stress-management.

How?

· Establish what areas of your life feel deficient or not up to par with where you'd like them to be.

· Write down all of your primary and secondary priorities no matter how big or small.

· Organize each list by your most prominent priorities.

· Save your primary list somewhere safe. This is just a reminder of your core values.

· Choose 2-5 items from your self-care list. If you find this list is short, go back to “How to daydream” for tips on how to enrich your list of

aspirations and dreams.

· Schedule these using whichever scheduling platform suits your lifestyle best.

· Some alternative scheduling platforms to the Google calendar include: Fantastical 2, TimeTree or Jorte.

· Hold yourself accountable by creating a consequence for not making more time for yourself. Your boss would likely reprimand you for not

completing a project, right?

· Acknowledge how completing these amazing, life-fulling self-care tasks enrich your life and even improve your primary priorities!

We all have a never-ending list of responsibilities. They are all important and most of them often need to be done ASAP. But when you lose sight of the big picture of life, you become the things you have to do and not the person you are or who you want to be. Life is short. Sort out what’s important to you and make it happen!