Some of you have been doing this for ages and you’re already a pro, and some of you who saw my schedule said “woah, that’s so rigid, I need more flexibility!” Structure enables flexibility. When you design your ideal week, you start to see that the time you think you have is often not in alignment with how much time you actually have.Īfter designing my ideal week, I had a much clearer idea of how to create a framework for my week that would empower me to feel more focused by theming days of the week, and even parts of the day. Actually follow through on the things that have been nagging at you for a long time. Update your contracts and proposals (which has been on your to-do list for how long.?) Spend more time with your family. It takes time to build margin into your schedule.Write a book.

I spent nearly a year turning down every new project (and even getting rid of old ones) so that I could reduce my workload, build in more margin, and create what is now Digital Strategy School. What if we left more room for growth (personal or professional) and stopped being one with “busy-ness”? What if instead of booking up to 100% capacity (which more often than not ends up being closer to 120%), we only booked up to an 80% capacity? At the time this seemed like a good thing: doesn’t growing my business mean getting more clients? A long redesign. I wasn’t really growing my business in a sustainable way I was just booking one client after the next. Last year I wrote about why booking too far in advance can be dangerous for your business, and this concept of margin so eloquently captures what I had recognized had been my problem: I was so booked up with clients that I wasn’t leaving any margin for error, growth, planning, or reflection. Margin is the gap between rest and exhaustion, the space between breathing freely and suffocating.

It is something held in reserve for contingencies or unanticipated situations. It is the amount allowed beyond that which is needed. Margin is the space between our load and our limits. (who wrote the book: Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives) describes margin like this: I stumbled upon the concept of margin while reading a post by Michael Hyatt, which led me to design my ideal week.

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