Seven Ways to Widen Your Margin

My favorite part of retirement is having wide margins in my schedule. When we travel, we like a pace that leaves room for lingering. When we’re at home, I sometimes have days with nothing on the agenda that HAS to be done. Even on the days with scheduled events, it isn’t back-to-back like it was in my career days. Margin leaves room for the unexpected or spontaneous.

But you do not have to wait until you retire to enjoy margin. In the last decade of my career, I began to find the small things that made a difference in the width of my margin. The hard truth is that you create margin in your schedule the same way you create it in your budget.  You take it out first and then protect it like a mama bear. Margin is created by reserving time, measured in seconds and minutes, or months and years.

1)              SECONDS: Find the natural short pauses in the day to do your deep breathing. Waiting at a traffic light. Waiting for the microwave to ding. Waiting for the kids to come out to their chauffeured ride home.

2)              MINUTES: Schedule meetings/appointments that are in your control for 50 minutes vs. an hour or 25 minutes vs. a half hour. The cushion gives you time to breathe or get to your next meeting or do a few emails or use the potty, for crying out loud!

3)              HOURS: Decide how many week nights you are ok to have something on your family’s agenda and start saying “no” after the max is scheduled. This might mean limiting your children to only 1 or 2 extracurricular activities. It may require reducing your own hobbies, volunteer, or work commitments, or a million other good things that you could do, but choose not to in order to create margin.

4)              DAYS: Plan vacations well ahead, and put money down on them. Then you can say “Sorry, this vacation has been scheduled for months and I’ve already paid for it.” Protecting vacations is easier if you have the corporate culture and leadership that role models it. If not, you become the role model. Remember that vacations don’t have to come in whole weeks. You can take ‘half’ vacations if your employer supports it. Work mornings and take the afternoons off for a week or two. Take every Wednesday off for the whole summer.

5)              WEEKS: The kind of margin that is measured in weeks usually comes uninvited. We experience illnesses or injuries that require recovery time. Don’t be a hero and try to cut your recovery time short. You’re not that irreplaceable. Resist the temptation to cram a big to-do list on top when you start feeling better.

6)              MONTHS & YEARS: A couple years before retiring, my mantra became “Practice retirement.” Not only did we practice living on our retirement budget, we also began creating wider margins in our schedule. It made my career much more enjoyable. Wished I would have started practicing that a few years earlier.

7)              ETERNITY: If you plan to spend eternity with God, practice the margin of eternity now.

Be still and know that I am God. [Psalm 46:10 ESV]

Eternity will be an infinite margin to worship Him. Create margin to be still with Him now. In the quiet of the margin we remember what we already know. He is God.