Think of your life as a sheet of notebook paper. On this sheet, there is the main part of the page, and there is the margin on the side. The page presents the main things in your life, and the margin hold the extra things in your life if there’s time, energy and funds left over.
In a lot of my life, I put the mundane things on the page, and I put the really important things in the margin. I prioritized the urgent, and sidelined the important. Anything demanding my attention went onto the page. Anything without a deadline including living a legacy, went into the margin.
It’s easy to do. We tell ourselves that we have to eat. We have to do the chores. we have to go to work. We need to rest. We put this stuff on the page of our life. Then all the stuff we want to do, like starting a business, learning how to mentor, giving a hand up to folks who need it, all this goes in the margin.
Our margin gets the left-overs of our effort, so we usually do a half-baked job. If we do it at all, we give it lip service, or we do just enough to “check the box”. These things aren’t getting our full attention and effort.
Sometimes we talk about how our life is too full, and some claim that we need to take things out of our margin, no matter how important, so we can avoid burn-out.
But I have a different thought about this. What if we moved the really important things out of the margin and put them on the page? What would it be like if the urgent didn’t crowd out the important in our life? How would this feel? Would life start to feel more meaningful? Would we stop feeling like we’re stuck on a hamster wheel?
What would this look like for you? What would you have to adjust to do this? In my experience, these adjustments are not easy, but they are worth it.
