Using your calendar to support your new habits

Calendaring to make the most important things in your life sacred

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

You’ve intended some new habits and made some new goals for yourself.

Now what? How will you fit them into your life? How will you keep them going?

You’re busy, and life is constantly pulling at you. Being a good person, you want to be there for everyone else. You don’t want them to think they’re not important.

The problem is, there’s no space for you and your new intentions, and you’re not okay with that. But you don’t know what to do, and how to make this one stick. It’s frustrating.

I can’t tell you how many people have asked,

When is it my turn??

BEING TOO BUSY -

There’s a Zen saying:

Sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day.

Unless you’re too busy. Then sit for an hour.

Why does this saying even make sense?

1. “I’m too busy” is another way of saying “I don’t have command over myself and my time.” Sitting for an hour every day creates a mental shift that delivers discernment. The difference between seated meditation and running as meditation is that the latter feels productive while the former does not. This is a test in our assumptions, amongst other things.

2. Through meditation, you will strengthen your introspection muscle, which means you will get to understand yourself more deeply and readily. Which means then, that you will naturally start to create more space and choose what you truly need.

Image by irongroup from Pixabay

A friend recently told me that she doesn’t think she’ll have time to practice self care until her kids are out of the house. Her youngest is 7… that’s a long time from now!

I’ll get to it when the kids leave the house.

Or when I’m retired. Or when everything else gets done. Or when I’m feeling more desperate and there’s nowhere else to turn.

By that time, you could be stepping into the second 50 years of your life, or you’re working from behind, which is not an easy place to start. Your body is different, your head is in a different space, your energy is in a different way, and, because you’ve put yourself on hold for so long, you barely remember what you want anymore.

So to start with baby steps, you pick up lessons from Atomic Habits and try to adopt the small habits that promise big change.

While this seems the most doable, it’s still hard.

• It’s hard to remember to keep up the new habits even though the book tells you how to make it easier to keep them up.

• It’s hard to transcend the thoughts and emotions that resist even the smallest changes.

A few things are happening that hold us back from our best intentions:

1. We have trouble saying no to others. We don’t want to feel momentarily uncomfortable, so we say yes. I’ll restart my habit(s) tomorrow and do this with/ for her today.

2. We think staying busy is important. We feel important when we’re busy, until we feel exhausted, malnourished, and empty. We don’t understand the necessity and ‘productivity’ of space and boredom.

3. We are motivated by external accountability (everyone else’s expectations), so they take over.

4. We were taught that taking care of ourselves is selfish. Even though we know this is b.s., we abide by it anyway.

5. We think our to-do list is actually important. We love the act of crossing things off the list, so we start with the low-hanging fruit to experience a handful of false wins, and in doing so, we miss out on our most creative times of day. Drop your to-do list and start Calendaring instead.

Calendaring

There are select events that most of us put on our calendars, because they are important enough:

1. Weddings and other milestone events

2. Doctor’s appointments and interviews

3. Vacation

4. Birthdays

This leaves a lot of room for the rest of our lives.

Here’s what happens in between all that, which we don’t necessarily put on our calendar:

• Work, with a cafe stop on the way

• Kids pick up and drop off, along with a cafe run (could take 20 extra minutes)

• Errands and to-do list activities, along with a cafe run and spontaneous extra errands

• Happy hour: a client once asked me, what can I drink at 4 pm instead of wine? I said water. She laughed.
  Happy hour (funny to call it that) is typically anytime between 3 pm and dinnertime, when we’re short on energy and willpower, and we choose things that mute our senses and emotions.

• Screen time, snack time, nap time

But shit, you don’t have time to:

• Meditate

• Write, Journal

• Read

• Take a walk in fresh air, move your body

• Engage in a hobby

• Schedule time with a friend (more than once every blue moon) due to an internalized obligation to be available for obligations that might come up

• Spend a little time each day on your dream project

HERE’S WHERE CALENDARING COMES IN.

Calendaring asks you to

• Try out what you might value until you figure out what you actually value.

• Schedule your values into your calendar first, and ahead of time, the way you would a wedding or doctor’s appointment. Because you are worthy.

• Make your time sacred by putting it in your calendar. Psychically, we take what’s in our calendar much, much more seriously than what’s in our head.

• Make your calendar your external accountability, trusting the wisdom of your past self (over your current mood) who scheduled you to do what you value in life.

• Use muscle testing to know if your schedule is aligned. This helps you become self-referred (opting self approval over external approval).

How to Calendar

Like creating a financial budget to get a clear sense of how you spend your money, and how to create reserves, you do the same with your day and your energy.

You allocate your time and get a better sense of how you can structure your day and support those amazing habits that you want to integrate into your life.

LET’S START WITH COLORS -

When we work with a financial budget, we use categories. We’ll do the same here, using colors:

Gold: aka Excellence Time
These are your non-negotiables. While you remain flexible, this time is most protected, and treated sacred, because this is your oxygen mask.

• These are the practices that you do, almost daily, that make you a better, happier, healthier, smarter, faster, wiser, stronger, a more soulful, purposeful, and playful person.

• This includes meditation and movement practices to strengthen your mind and body, connect you to your higher Self, and give you sustained energy.

Green: aka Money Time
This represents what you consider your most important work, paid or not.

If you’re paid, and you don’t consider it important, I challenge you to treat it as such anyway: it gives you livelihood (you can’t focus on anything else if you don’t know how you’ll put food on the table), and for that, it’s important and a gift.

Learning to make the mundane important helps to move from mundane to sacred.

• It doesn’t matter if you work a traditional job, a remote job, or for yourself, Green represents activities that draw opportunities.

• Delegatable activities are in Red (more on this below), versus green activities which require your personal creativity and unique energy to make what you do special.

• It can be something for which you get paid for, or it can be something you volunteer for. If it serves a deep purpose for you, it’s money. If you don’t feel like it serves a deep purpose for you, but it serves your ability to live financially, it’s money. Either way, use this time with full presence and gratitude.

Blue: aka Personal Time
This is what you do for YOU. This time is flexible, and unless you have a standing date-night or massage appointment, these activities will change from week to week.

• This is playtime.

• Blue activities include time with friends, date-nights, spa time, reading time, hobby time, nature time…

• Ask yourself the question: what would you do if you had nothing to solve?

• Having enough blues on our calendar to feel human is the biggest challenge for many of us, so if this is hard for you, you’re in good company. Put them in.

Red: aka Delegatable Time
This color represents what you do for others, or what you do that someone else can easily do.

• This includes anything you can possibly delegate if you had all the money in the world to do so.

• This includes errands and housework. It also includes work tasks that don’t feed your real purpose for being at work (i.e we can spend too much time perfecting, learning, organizing, and administrating and call these Green when they are Red).

• Doctor’s appointments are not Red because you can’t delegate those, and they are a part of personal self-care that some of us neglect. These are Blue.

• If you have kids in school, make them Red (just do it). When I first started coaching, my intake form included two questions:
  
  What is your greatest joy? What is your greatest challenge?
  
  Almost every mother answered “my children” to both. When I would go over what they ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, they’d tell me what their children and spouse ate… and I’d have to re-ask, what did YOU eat?
  
  So… to get back in touch with yourself (and not your mom self), your children must be coded Red until they become adult friends later in life.
  
  But what if I really enjoy spending time with them? Shouldn’t they be Blue? No.
  I get it, they are your greatest joy. Still color them Red. Get some friends for your Blue time.
  
  But the precious time I spend with them every night, that’s not delegatable!
  I totally agree with you. This one’s an exception. Color them Red. Moms are the worst at putting Blues on their calendar, so these can’t count as Blue. Don’t wait until you’re empty-nested to find other Blues.
  

• Over time, many Red activities will naturally drop off and you will be left with activities that are truly valuable to you. Activities that you would not choose to delegate, i.e. being with your kids and going to their games, taking care of other family members, and if you enjoy them and have the time: cooking, housekeeping, organizing, landscaping, grocery shopping…)

White: aka Space

• Don’t try to fit too much in a day.

• Make sure to leave open space before and after most events. And intentionally create some small blocks of white space in your day.

• You’ll be grateful for the extra padding for wild cards, overtime, minor emergencies, spontaneous play, smoother transitions, and boredom.

CREATING YOUR CALENDAR -

Now open your calendar, and let’s fill it.

Which calendar to use…
Google calendar works great. I use it because it gives you color options, and you can automatically schedule things as recurring. Those are the two functionalities that are helpful for Calendaring.

I had a client who loved using actual notebooks for things; they felt more grounding to her than the digital versions. She used highlighters and didn’t mind manually scheduling in her recurring events. If this is you, find a scheduler that’s broken down into 15-minute increments.

Schedule yourself a week or two out in the following order.
It’s very possible that you will see your day unfold in a similar order.

1. GOLD, Excellence Time, your non-negotiables.
   You’ll ideally start your day with Gold since these activities exist to wake up, open, and elevate your body and mind. Scheduling Gold in the middle of the day makes consistency hard because unexpected events come up and take over.
   Gold can also be scheduled as the last thing you do before you go to bed. If you do this, might I suggest that you literally make this the last thing you do just before your head hits the pillow… rather than turn on the news, scroll, or have a heavy conversation with someone afterwards. Going to bed on Gold enhances sleep quality.
   

2. GREEN, Money Time, your most important work.
   Mornings (between Gold Time and lunchtime) are when you’ll likely have the freshest energy and creativity. These are the windows of time you want to block for work that require energy and creativity.
   

3. BLUE, Personal Time.
   This serves well as an afternoon or early evening activity, replacing “happy hour” activity with nourishment and connection. Schedule activities that you enjoy for the sake of itself. Connect with friends: challenge yourself to schedule a friend in once or twice a week.
   

4. WHITE, Aah… Space!
   Make sure you’ve created enough space for nothing in your life.
   

5. RED, the Delegate-ables.
   Schedule this one LAST.
   If you run out of time, start delegating some of them.
   Without a calendar, we often let the red take over, and we wonder why we’re running on fumes.
   There’s one important EXCEPTION: our children need daily, uninterrupted, un-multitasked attention without the screen in front of you or them. No phone call is more important than this time; put your phone on airplane mode. Just 20 minutes of pure presence will fill your kids up like you wouldn’t believe. You will notice that they tantrum less, and they will learn to self-soothe better.
   You may be thinking, but I’m waiting on an important business call. Would you take your phone into a massage room with you? No, you wouldn’t. Massages are an hour long; this is 20 minutes. Also, imagine if your date couldn’t give you 20 minutes of presence; it would be off-putting… You got this. Schedule this in daily, even before your blues. It could be different times of day each day, but this one’s an important Red.

my calendar

You will see how quickly these events fill up your time. You’ll know how much time you actually have for extraneous requests for your time. You’ll notice yourself working through each of your decisions by color (by values and priorities). In these ways, this system supports living into your most authentic life, not tomorrow, but today.

MUSCLE TESTING -

Look at your calendar a week out and see how it feels to look at it. Don’t try to feel this with your head. Instead feel with your body.

• Do you feel lighter and happier by what you see? If this were someone else’s calendar, would you say, I want that?

• Or does your calendar feel heavy, like you hate your life? If this is how it feels, go back and make some adjustments, little by little.

SOME NOTES -

• If scheduling a week or two out is difficult for you, start by creating your calendar as you live your day and color code them accordingly. Then at the end of the week, muscle test your past week. Seeing how you spent your money time is just what you need to get clarity and a good idea on how to tweak it for the future.

• If you’re feeling spent, it’s likely because your life is one big RED. It’s filled with reactions and responses to other people’s feelings, requests, expectations, sense of obligation, checking off to-do lists, returning messages, and cancelling on yourself. Get the other colors in there, stat!

• If you’re plagued by too much GREEN, check in with yourself on that. Make sure you’re not hiding from the rest of your life and denying yourself life in the present moment.

• If you’re GOLD and BLUE all day, you might also be hiding… only you know.

• Turn off your notifications. Learn to use Do Not Disturb, Silent Mode, and Airplane Mode on your phone. Check your emails and apps on your own time, not anyone else’s.

• Don’t make decision based on mood. It’s unreliable. Listen to the wisdom of your calendar instead.

• When you’re asked for your time, get in the habit of checking your calendar first. They might even look over at your phone and see how full your life is.
  Funny thing is, as long as it’s in your calendar, even if it says “quiet time,” people won’t question it (if they get nosy enough to read it). And frankly, neither will you. They’ll think, oh, you’re busy. On the other hand, if you don’t have it on your calendar, and you say, I need space to myself that afternoon, then they take it personally. Which, in the great scheme of things, it doesn’t matter, but the problem is, we don’t know how to say NO, except to ourselves. Once you realize that your days are indeed FULL (vs busy), it will get easier to say NO.

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Which colors are currently taking over your life?

Which color(s) do you have the most trouble scheduling?

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Here’s to living YOUR life 🎉

With love, Savitree