Unschedule Your Life and Work

March 3, 2015

Have you heard the term “unschedule” before. I hadn’t until about 6 months ago, but I realised that I had been doing it for a long time without knowing the term.

I’ll explain what it is. It is whereby you put into your calendar all the things you say are important but never go in there.

What do I mean?

Trips to the gym, date night with the missus, seeing your kid’s recital, spending time meditating, planning your week, weekly goal setting or review, self-directed learning – lunch!

The thing is that most working people are great at having a calendar full of appointments and meetings and everything else.

And usually those things get done. But…. at the expense of other things. What happens when you choose to “unschedule” is that you have to make those work appointments and meetings or commitments fit into the other more important things in your life. Like focussing on your health perhaps.

I have been “unscheduling” for years. I include all the important things in there like going to the gym (remembering travel time), personal development time, new experiences and so on.

When you do that, you’ll find pretty quickly that you actually don’t have all the hours you thought you did to “work”. That if your life is to progress and you’re going to give time to things you say are important, then you will have to recognise that your other commitments will have to adjust to allow for all the important things.

If it’s not scheduled in, then it’s probably not getting done (or at least not consistently).

I saw a client yesterday and this was probably the biggest takeaway for her. She never had her personal time scheduled in. And that also meant that when other options came her way, she then had to make a decision about what to do. With the time (at the gym) scheduled in already for her, the decision has already been made.

There’s three important things to note in this process of unscheduling:

You don’t have as much time as you think to “work” if you are to do all you say is important to you.
You can prevent a crisis of decision making in the moment if you already commit to an action ahead of time when you are in the right frame of mind. E.g. you are committing to go to the gym when you are focussed and motivated (when you pop it in your calendar), rather than having to decide when you’re tired and hungry.
Seeing it in your calendar embeds it into the unconscious mind and therefore starts to form a solid connection to get you going to the gym (or whatever the activity is).

So your action for today is to list the things that are important for you to do and to schedule those into your working week.

These are now commitments to yourself. They are harder to break and less likely to be ignored now.

Start “unscheduling” today and witness the changes.