Budgets are the foundations of businesses and families that run smoothly. Mostly we budget our money, planning out how to spend our expected income, using our needs, values and desires as guides. We also budget our time. We often do this less explicitly, unless we take Rosemary Tator’s courses within her More Time for You curriculum. In this way, you actually do budget your time quite precisely, using a calendar. In that process, I got to see Rosemary’s calendar as an example and something stuck out to me, that every morning she put a half an hour of “Unfinished business from yesterday”. That was a color coded block of time, for her, somewhere before 9am.

How brilliant I thought. I took that concept and ran. I put “Taking vitamins” on my calendar and actually now take my vitamins every morning. I put “Check email” in three different spots, morning, noon and evening. How glorious not to be hijacked by my email dinging all day – silence! And more work done, more play, more ease.

A few weeks ago I had a baby, my second, and like these small creatures have a tendency to do, life flipped up and around and well, I started losing and breaking things, like wallets, important papers, the headphones. And I realized, in great delirium, that if I were using my calendar, I’d add in a category called “Fixing mistakes.” Then, coincidentally, a client of ours shared how she procrastinates, or in her words, “delays conversations.” So we came up with the idea to put in her calendar 15 minutes a day to “Have difficult conversations.” If there were none to have, all the better, free 15 minutes.

Inside of sufficiency and the context it allows for experimentation, I have noticed that time is not static and unchanging. In fact, it is quite flexible, it almost bends. The baby joining our family has proved that – long slow days that go by quickly with little to show for it. The other end of the speedometer bends time in another way: road warriors working 15 hours a day feel that quick pace of action, and production, and the spinning almost of their day, almost like it never even happened. Both have the sense of scarcity, never enough, and yet time is experienced differently, has a different flavor, texture or tenor.

The great thing about budgeting for time is that it helps us tell the truth about ourselves, the context we choose to live and work in, and ultimately it allows some bit of opening to happen within what is often a sense of time constriction. I do not normally make so many errors, but I can know that right now, I probably might – I could probably count on it actually, so I can adjust my expectations and budget in my days the reality that I will be cleaning up some messes I make. Same is true for my client – rather than allow the nagging she hears to talk to that person and leak her precious attention, she can just simply have (or not have, but consciously) that conversation.

Whether we engage in using our calendars this way or not, we can use the wisdom of being honest about what is happening in our lives and work and apply some simply tools to live more fully inside of sufficiency, flow and ease.

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