It is your day off. You have been looking forward to this time for weeks. You have a list as long as your arm of relaxing things that you will spend these precious hours doing. You realise half way through the day that it is not possible to get everything done and your day will be anything but relaxing. You rush from errand to appointment and back again ending at home utterly exhausted, wishing that you had just picked up take away on your way home from work, because that (or getting a root canal) would have been less stressful. Does this ever happen to you?

This phenomena is born of two things:

1. We grossly underestimate how long it takes to ‘do’ something
2. We focus too much on the exhalation (the execution of a task) and forget the inspiration (the space between tasks)

I often plan to do something before I go to bed, like have a cup of tea and some chocolate or give myself a mini facial or read or write a blog or whatever. Two nights a week, if I am absolutely on fire, I will do one of those things before I go to bed. Instead I usually pack up the baby’s toys, pack the dishwasher and clean the kitchen benches, organise lunches for tomorrow, write my other half a lovely note for him to wake up to, put a load of washing on, balance the budget or any of the millions of mundane necessary things that I never include in my schedule.

This isn’t simply a Mum thing either. I know I used to plan meetings back to back when I worked in finance, giving myself 5 minutes to go to the bathroom and re-fill the water jug, only to find that the clients were early, my staff needed to run some issues past me, the printer was stuffed and the documents hadn’t printed and that I had a million emails to address.

Planning and scheduling is important. I think it is impossible minimise stress without knowing, for the most part, what needs to be done and allocating time for it. But so many of us don’t schedule to our priorities and only schedule a fraction of our tasks, but allocate them the majority of our time.

Lesson: To live with a sense of tranquility schedule the inspiration as well as the exhalation. And as any good yoga teacher will tell you; if you want to relax the inspiration should be as long as the exhalation.

Tags: Challenge, Lessons, Observations, Organisation, Stress

This entry was posted on Friday, December 11th, 2009 at 9:30 am and is filed under Coaching, Life, Personal Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.