Emotional Calendar

I’m embarrassed to tell you how many emails I have in my inbox. My plan was to clean them out when we went on our sabbatical… in 2010. That never happened. Oops. Voicemails are evil. Every single one of the closets in my house needs reorganizing. My photos… don’t even go there. My anxiety levels are going up as I type!Yes, there are 1,000 ways I need to get reorganized as we start rolling in 2017. Most of them, I’m choosing to ignore. I’m choosing to do what I can and release the rest of the list. My only other choice is to fall back into the Miss Perfect trap again. And I refuse.[bctt tweet="I refuse to fall back into the Miss Perfect trap."]But… there’s one thing I want to organize differently this year when it comes to my calendar. In spite of the fact that I make pretty good use of my time, this past fall I realized that I’d made a huge error in my scheduling: I neglect humanity every time I whip out my calendar app to see if there’s a blank spot on my schedule. Let me explain…Every appointment is not the same. Every 60 minutes is not the same. There are some things I do that are very life-giving. There are other things on my calendar that are life-draining. And yet, up to this point in my life, I’ve made no account for this variation. I told Chris that we need an emotional calendar. Sounds kind of funny, especially if you know my personality! Yet when I find myself wondering why I’m so worn out when my schedule isn’t any fuller than the week before, I think the answer lies within the toll of what I’ve done, not in how many appointments I’ve had.So, go with me… If we know that we have to have a tough conversation at work or a trip out of town, how many of us build a little margin in to regroup? Not me. I know to schedule my calendar at 80% to allow for the unexpected 20% that will happen (a great practice that I’m periodically successful at)… but what about acknowledging that some parts of life require a little bit of space to regroup?[bctt tweet="Let's stop scheduling our lives as if we're robots."]We aren’t robots and yet many of us schedule our lives as if we are. Let’s be honest: We generally know the people and appointments that suck the joy out of us. On those occasions when we know in advance that we’re going to have to wade into undesired territory, what if in 2017 we take that into account? Do you have major decisions to make in life? There are some tough conversations and meetings that we can’t anticipate, but what if we make wise choices around those we can? How helpful would it be to anticipate that the decision making process might necessitate a little room to regroup?My desire is to be fully present and full of joy and peace in 2017. There are 100 things to be anxious about if I choose. But by being intentional and alert to what will require my heart to do some extra work, I think I position myself to be a woman who keeps room for God to speak into my life and avoid allowing emotional fatigue from weighing me down.I invite you to join my experiment. And I’d love to hear from you about the types of things in your world that you could stand to add a little margin to adequately recover from?