Month 1, Schedule Decluttering. Step 3: Confronting the Schedule Beast

This task terrified me for six full days – not long in calendar time but an eternity in procrastination years. April's bloated calendar of Easter obligations, Lent commitments, and academic deadlines provided excellent excuses to avoid my "declutter the schedule" reckoning.

When I finally faced the blank page of schedule reconstruction, panic set in. In a spectacular display of avoidance, I decided scissors-sharpening was suddenly urgent. Nothing says "I'm handling adult responsibilities well" like prioritizing cutlery maintenance over life planning. Unfortunately, even my procrastination tactics betrayed me – whetstones require soaking before sharpening, leaving me alone with the empty page and the crushing weight of time-management decisions.

The task required snacks, frequent breaks, and ‘escape work’ which I could periodically pick up to rejuvenate my feelings of productivity. Ultimately, there was not one activity in my core set of commitments that I could, or wanted to, get rid of. Apparently, I love everything I do – or I'm terrible at priorities. Probably both.

I love my data analysis/coding job and teaching high school physics. I love going to church and serving on the music team and being discipled. I've cultivated a life filled with things I can't bear to eliminate. How inconvenient.

Errands, of course, were the one set of activities I would be pleased to part with, but I wasn’t sure how to reduce those any further than I already had by purchasing a meal subscription.

Boundaries, I decided, were the way to go. Because I had previously made an overlaid line-chart relating ‘happiness/contentment’ to ‘hours spent in a week’ for various jobs and activities (don’t judge me), I knew that some activities reached a point of diminishing returns on happiness faster than others. I also knew that when the week was generally quite full, the ‘happiness factor’ for any activity was prone to dropping much sooner than usual due to a sense of hurry and overwhelm.

I can’t afford to be taking two hours on this lesson plan, I still must figure out what songs we are playing on Sunday!

This visitor has stayed too long, and I haven’t been paying attention for the last ten minutes of their story because I’m thinking about those three lines of code I need to fix for work.

To work towards a better daily life, I began to set a more rigid structure around my nebulous activities.

Practically everything in my life is nebulous.

I have to be at school when I’m scheduled to teach, but other than that I can largely set my own hours and work locations. Which is great. And terrible. The freedom to work anywhere at any time quickly becomes the obligation to work everywhere all the time. Saying, "Okay, I need to fit in 25 hours a week minimum for this job" is quite different than knowing exactly how I will fit those hours in efficiently. It's like being told to build a house with a pile of lumber but no blueprint.

Shockingly, I mostly stick to the routines I established. It's significantly reduced the underlying stress and guilt that once plagued my schedule. I've intentionally limited my pre-planned commitments to create space for the unexpected engagements that inevitably appear throughout the week. Rather than booking myself to 100% capacity (and then feeling shocked and frustrated when life demands 110%), I now plan for 80% and welcome the remaining 20% as it naturally unfolds. And it always does - friends suddenly breakup, delightful opportunities emerge, parents request meetings about their students - the good, bad and ugly (im)patiently wait for their place in a schedule.

I experienced a breakthrough moment recently during an impromptu meeting with a physics student's parent. We met for nearly two hours and I felt completely present—not rushed, irritated, or stressed. Where previously I would have left such a meeting overwhelmed by what awaited me, I instead departed feeling genuinely happy. Happy to have given this parent my full attention, to have listened deeply, and to have never once felt the urge to check the time or hurry the conversation. Though I began this approach just two weeks ago, I've already glimpsed what might be possible: a more loving version of myself.