Create Structure in Your Life

Our lives can feel overwhelming, with too many things to do! We have chores and small tasks and messages to answer, bills to pay, dishes to wash, people to contact, and much more. So how do we handle all of this?

First, it can feel overwhelming when it’s a huge pile of stuff and seemingly not enough time.

Second, the small stuff will overwhelm all the available space, because it always feels urgent when we’re feeling behind and overwhelmed.

So one good answer is to create structure. Create spaces to deal with all the things in your life:

• Bill Pay Mondays
• Inbox Zero Tuesdays
• Admin Fridays
• House Chore Party Saturdays
• Email and messages Sacred Hour – daily at 4pm
• Morning planning & intentions
• Monthly taxes day
• Meaningful Work Play Time at 10am daily
• And so on
• Do good work

Not these specific spaces — your structure will be different than these. But if you have a space for all the stuff, you can relax and know that it will be taken care of.

What structure can you create to take care of everything important, while creating structured and intentional space for your meaningful work?

Create Even More Space

Let’s say you’re so busy that you can only find 30 minutes a week for your meaningful work — it’s a great start! But take it as a starting point.

Maybe you can create more time by bundling your emails and messages into a certain hour each day. Maybe you can free up some time by hiring a babysitter, a house cleaner, someone on Craigslist to haul away your junk for you. Someone to answer your customer service emails, or an admin asssitant to take care of routine tasks.

Or maybe you can eliminate or simplify some things to create more space. Get out of commitments. Tell people No. Ask for postponements.

Sometimes we can cut out distractions, like social media or video watching or news/website reading. If we’re honest, there’s a lot of wasted time in our days that can be streamlined for the sake of what’s truly important.

Get creative! Sometimes it takes a little time investment to simplify, but then it pays off in space in a week or two.

Really Pour Yourself Into It

Once you have the space, it can be hard to focus. All the other stuff is calling to you! Maybe you spend the first 20 minutes of the 40 minutes you’ve carved out just getting ready. Maybe the whole focus block gets pushed back until later because you feel something else is more urgent.

Create the structure to make the meaningful work happen. Sometimes it means doing it on a video call with someone else — each of you do your meaningful work on mute for an hour.

But when you’re in the focus block — pour yourself into it. Give it your full being. Be all in.

Don’t go half way, commit and produce.