Margin, and why it's the critical lifestyle element you may be missing

The Go Slow Life encourages you to take time, and do your life's daily activities with care and intentionality, whatever they may be.  Margin, or put simply, a time buffer is the critical life element you may be missing.  

Where does margin come in? Margin is the flexibility that you get when you're not scheduled back to back, running late or overcommitted.  Example, you're on your way to an appointment when you encounter a traffic backup.  Without margin, you might start to go into panic mode and get frustrated and angry at the other drivers because it's going to make you late for your appointment.  Then, you get to the appointment late, and have to make apologies for the traffic, or worse, you've missed your appointment and have to reschedule, thereby doubling the effort all over again.

With margin, you have that buffer of time to account for the traffic jam.  Is there always going to be a traffic jam? No, and we'll get to that in a minute.  Do you need to allow for all possible impediments on your way to your appointment? No, unless you're catching a flight or some other hard deadline that can't be missed.

Margin is not OVER-preparing, margin is giving yourself breathing room as you go about your day.

However, there are many common practices that eat away at margin. Procrastination is a very common behavioral shortfall in many people's worlds.  Generally, procrastination is derived from the expectation of negative feelings about the task, whether anxiety, confusion, difficulty or any other general uneasiness about one's ability to attend to the activity.  And so humans look for the way to derive pleasant feelings in the moment, and put off the anticipated negative feelings.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the act procrastinating. Procrastinating itself has no inherent positive or negative value.  (I'll be honest, writing this blog post is giving me positive feelings and I'm presently procrastinating on getting up and throwing a load of laundry in!). It's the outcomes of procrastinating, and the subsequent reduction in margin of time of being able to complete the task that causes negative outcomes.  

Another common practice that eats away at Margin is not giving enough credence for the amount of time that it will take to complete a task.  How will you know how long tasks actually take? Start measuring them in accurate ways.  Pay attention to the actual amount of time it takes to drive across town for the appointment during rush hour.  See how long the entire recipe actually takes to prepare.  I tend to be an overly optimistic person about how something will go and then when it inevitably doesn't go as planned, I lose my margin.

Another hard truth about what's eating up your Margin: the barbed hooks of the attention economy.  This may or may not be your phone, your tablet, your computer, your gaming system, your TV or any other such media device, but in today's society, there's a very high likelihood that behaviors stemming from social media, gaming and media consumption are eating away at your margin.  Your time and attention is the rare commodity that media companies want from you.  How much of your daily margin are you willingly prepared to hand over to large corporations? 

Now that we've discussed what margin is, and how it can be elapsed, how then do we create more margin in life? It's not over-preparing, but just giving yourself some room.  Here are some actionable steps:

- Look at tomorrow's schedule before today is done and think through the potential impediments to the appointments.  Make realistic judgements about what needs to get done and how long it will take.

- Put buffers into your calendar. Whenever I have an offsite meeting, I figure out how long it will take to get there and put that "travel" calendar event before and after my meeting.  This way I have a visual reminder to leave for the meeting at a certain time and that time doesn't get scheduled otherwise.

- If you find yourself being habitually 5 minutes late to appointments, start leaving 10 minutes earlier than you think you should.  It will feel weird at first but it will start becoming more habitual the more you do it and you'll start to see how it gives you the margin you're missing.

-  Take a week off from media consumption.  Read a book instead.  Do one thing at a time instead of checking your phone every 5 minutes while doing another activity.  See how you feel after this week.

This only scratches the surface of how margin can be used to create a more intentional Go Slow Life.