If you’re a reader, then you know what margin is. It’s the space we see around the edges of a book or paper. It’s the white space that lets our eyes rest so we don’t have to read from edge to edge on a piece of paper. Margin in a book is extremely helpful, and is equally necessary in our day to day lives.
I’m currently sitting at my computer trying to focus through some mental fog. Mental fog happens when we’re pushing into the margins or when we’re recovering from illness or suffering from exhaustion. For me, it’s the second on the list. Mental fog induced by illness and medication. It’s the whole medicine head feeling and I can’t stand it! But what does this have to do with margin?
Well sometimes we find ourselves living in the margins of life and something has to happen to get us to slow down and leave some white space. This is pretty much what happened to me. I have a tendency to live life at a 100mph pace. It’s constantly a go…go…go…scenario. From church to family to home to property matters to membership issues to community engagement to social life there are so many things that pull for our attention and it’s easy to find ourselves living in the margins of life.
So the question is do you have breathing room in your life? Have you created and protected space in your life for margin? Or have you scheduled your life so tightly and so completely that you have no room to add anything additional?
Living life without margin is dangerous. It’s dangerous because we weren’t created to live without it. We were created for a healthy give and take between work and rest. We were created to rest from our work and work from our rest. But when we fill the white space in our lives, leaving no room for rest, then we’re not able to recover and get back to the stuff of productivity.
There are plenty of ways to preserve margin in life. You just have to make it a priority. Margin can look like 15 extra minutes between appointments. Adding 10 minutes to your estimated drive time so you don’t have to rush. Scheduling a block of time for recovery or study time or a nap.
Now I know what some of you are thinking. You don’t nap. And well I really don’t either but some people find a nap superbly rejuvenating. There are actually studies that show a 26 minute nap can essentially reset your day and start your productivity clock over again. That means if you can carve our 26 minutes to completely disconnect and shutdown to nap, you can haver two day’s worth of productivity in one day!
You see when we don’t preserve our margin, something will happen to force that reset. For me it generally comes with migraines of in the latest case a dose of illness to knock me off my feet for about 10 days. It sucks to say the least.
So take it from me, you can save a lot of downtime and exhaustion by just carving out some margin and preserving it like your life depended on it…because it kind of does!
