Most advice books about personal organization are broadly aimed in two directions: task and work flow for knowledge work (managing the constant stream of messages and meetings), and task and work flow for the home (managing the constant stream of meals, dishes, and laundry).

To my mind, the main reason to learn how to manage our work, is so that we can make time for important things besides work.

We work on managing tasks at work and at home SO THAT we may experience much more in our lives than “getting things done.”

Much of the teaching that’s lumped under the word “organization,” is about setting boundaries around needs and inputs that never end; like meals, and messages.

Organizing yourself is primarily about building in limits: corraling your work, figuring out when you’ve done enough work — whether that work is done on a screen, or in a kitchen — SO THAT you can make the time to do the things that make your life feel like a gift, and a joy.

For a well-lived life, we organize ourselves not only or even primarily to get things done; but to get to doing the things that are worth doing, while feeling at peace that the work we have done for the day, is good enough.

My writing about personal organization aims toward how to organize yourself so that you can have a whole, well-lived life; so you can make time for leisure, contemplation, companionship.

So you can look back someday over a life that felt much richer than simply getting work done.

This is productivity with a purpose: to manage your tasks, so that they do not steal your whole life. To manage your time, so you make ample time to do things you will remember, with joy.

A well-lived life is not just about — or even primarily about — getting work done. When we look back on our lives, hopefully at a very old age, we’ll want to have wonderful memories to savor: people we have loved, places we have explored and rejoiced in, projects and pursuits that have delighted us.

Many people hold the mindset that organizing yourself is about organizing your work, full stop: setting up templates for email replies, or setting aside one day a week to power through the laundry.

I think organizing yourself is about organizing toward time away from work.

We can easily fill our time with work; there is always more than you can actually do. The hard part is making time away from work, while still fulfilling our work-related commitments and responsibilities.

Focus on what you do with your time, when you are NOT working.

When people look back on their lives, they often talk with me about what happened during the times when they were NOT doing paid work, or household care tasks.

I’ve been surprised, more than once, reading the obituaries of people in my parish who accomplished remarkable things in their careers, in some cases things that had national impact… and never once mentioned those achievements to me.

Ten, twenty, thirty years after they retire, they don’t talk with me about CV and résumé things. They talk about what happened in their lives, when they were NOT working.

What careerism casts as the the background noise, might actually be the most important part of life. Certainly for many, the most resonant; at the end.

Better to look back on things like rich and deep relationships. Better to look back on adventures and explorations. I’ve heard stories about long drives, in pursuit of visiting all the state parks. Hikes. Trips to the beach. Playing music together. Learning to build a dog house. Playing cards with little kids who giggle and cheat; and think they’ve fooled you.

Here’s something I’d love to try, when I’m not working: Hosting an open house some winter holiday, with a crackling fire, hot chocolate, a pile of books, and friends coming in and out.

Organize yourself so you can set some boundaries around work, and do interesting things besides work.

New Year’s Suggestion: Work Out a Simple Schedule Where You Focus on What Happens When You are NOT Working

In my church communities, I teach a workshop about creating a rule of life, and what participants leave with, is a simple schedule.

I walk people through a process which gives them time to think — and to write down — commitments that arise from thinking about relationships to these life areas: your relationship to God / Life (or whatever other name for you, refers to that deepest aspect of reality), your relationships and roles with other people, with your self (body, mind, and spirit), with the natural world, and with technology.

And then we spend time during the workshop making a schedule: what are the things you might do on a daily basis, a weekly basis, a semi-annual basis to live out the commitments you want to make?

The short version of this workshop takes about 45 minutes; and what people leave with, is a schedule.

A schedule of things they are committed to doing, when they are NOT doing tasks for paid work, or for the household.

Make 2023 the Year of Scheduling Something Important to You, But Not Urgent; on a Regular Basis.

One definition of “work” — whether it’s done in front of a computer or done in front of a kitchen sink — might be that “work” is about attending to something that either is urgent, or will become urgent: you answer that email, or other problems build; you do those dishes, or other problems build.

Perhaps we might think of work as anything that will become urgent if we ignore it, e.g. putting air in the car tires, paying the bills, etc.

But the most important — and the most wonderful — things in life, are not urgent.

A paradox.

No one is going to pester you to do your writing; make your art; keep in touch with your friends; go out for a walk in the woods; learn to play a guitar. Years can go by with you telling yourself, “I’m going to learn to play an instrument,” and you just keep streaming other people’s music.

And some industries are perfectly complacent about soaking up all of your life energies on their behalf, even if it robs you of time for leisure and contemplation, ruins your mental and physical health, destroys your marriage, and blights your relationship with your children.

I’m a great believer in the mighty power of small changes to transform lives.

Your schedule — a realistic and friendly schedule that you can actually live out — is a mighty power.

With a daily routine that a) incorporates at least one thing that gives life to your spirit, and that b) you are committed to CHANGING until it actually works for you, you can transform your life.

For Individuals, Schedules Take Time to Build, and Much Grace and Realism to Maintain

By “functional schedule” I mean that if you decide you will meditate ten minutes a day before 5 p.m., you actually do meditate regularly before 5 p.m. (But not necessarily daily or even for ten minutes — read on.)

I love the research psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s image of the elephant and the rider: Your conscious mind is like a person riding an elephant.

Your body, your unconscious mind, your emotional mind, is the elephant.

Compared to the rest of your body and mind, your conscious mind is weak and tiny. Our conscious, well-meaning intentions are no match for our elephants.

Your conscious mind cannot force the rest of you to follow its agenda. You’ve got to get the elephant to cooperate, in order to make real change.

It’s a process of trial and error, patience, persuasion, befriending the elephant, learning to work together, getting to know when and how the elephant balks, trying something else.

Most people will not be able to create a schedule that is sustainable, at first. We get too ambitious, and we are usually too hard on ourselves.

If you can create a working daily routine for yourself, you have a tool to draw on, when life changes blow up your current routine.

If you can — by 2024 — learn how to STOP WORKING and attend to the important but not urgent things into your life, you will have a skill that you can draw on for the rest of your life.

You will have to periodically figure out, all your life, how you are going to make time to do the things that matter to you.

You do it with a schedule, a routine, that you can actually live out.

Draft A Daily Schedule with ONE Small, Important-but-Not-Urgent Thing On It

And keep it blindingly simple and minimal.

Consider what you might like to do on a daily basis, to refresh your spirit and give you a mental re-set, a re-boot.

Something you are not doing now, that you would like to do regularly.

Common activities: journaling, walking, meditating, doing some reading that sustains your spirit (poetry, scripture, philosophy).

If you are already doing something on a mostly daily basis that sustains your spirit; pick something else you’d like to do regularly, that is important but not urgent (in other words, pick something that you want to do; that no one will pester you to do; and where nothing will imminently malfunction if you ignore it).

Maybe it’s making something.

Maybe it is learning to play an instrument, or drawing, or whittling, or bird watching.

Something you can pick up and do in short, regular periods of time.

You keep the guitar out of its case, and you work on learning a tune for fifteen minutes a day or so.

You get a sketchbook and set a timer for five minutes and draw something you saw, each day.

Pick one thing. One important-but-not-urgent thing.

ONE.

Low Expectations, Slow Results, the Willingness to Keep Experimenting = Major, Lasting Change Over Time

Let’s say you do want to learn to play an instrument, and you never have done. Maybe the first couple of months of 2023, you use small, regular amounts of time to figure out how that will happen. Deciding what you want to play, researching online tutorials.

Maybe it takes you ten minutes a day over several months to work out: that you want to learn to play the Irish flute; buying a flute; finding an online tutorial, etc.

Maybe it takes the whole year before you have an actual flute in hand, and a way to learn to play it.

Maybe it’s 2024 before you are actually sitting down and working out a tune with your own flute in your hands. We usually underestimate how long it takes to set something up, so we can actually do it.

So what if it takes you until 2024 before you’re actually playing an instrument?

It will be 2024, anyway.

If it takes you all of 2023 to work out how you are going to do the important-to-you but non-urgent goal of learning to play an instrument, then you get all the rest of your years to play it.

Most of the really good things in our lives start very small; and build very slow.

We live in what is probably the most impatient culture, in the history of human civilization.

But growing something new takes time.

The Suggestion is NOT To Stick With This Schedule! It’s to Give Yourself a Whole Year, to Learn How to Build a Schedule You Can Stick With

Whatever you have put down for what you hope will become a regular personal practice, lower your expectations some more.

Less time. Less effort.

If you have decided you want to meditate daily, start with trying to do it regularly for one minute.

It’s going to take time to figure out where and how you’re going to do this; when, during the day, that you can realistically do the new important-but-not-urgent thing; and how long you can devote to it. And whether you even remember that you were going to do that. (”Oh yeah, I wanted to meditate today!”)

Give yourself patience. Give yourself friendliness. Give yourself time.

Why It’s So Much Easier For Monks and Nuns and Lieutenants to Live by a Schedule, Than It Is for You and Me

This idea of creating a daily schedule that prioritizes what is important-but-not urgent, came from the monastic practice of a rule of life; creating schedules that set aside regular time for contemplation and prayer.

A lot of people (me very much included) are drawn to the idea of living with the discipline of a monk or a nun — stopping work in order to meditate a few times a day, for example.

But monks have entire communities supporting their efforts. EVERYBODY stops, at set times. The community bell rings; the gong sounds. And everything, and everybody, stops to pray.

Monastic communities have a lot in common with the military. Both military and monastic communities live in systems with well-defined roles, expectations, and schedules.

And both military and monastic communities require obedience: with sworn oaths, and sworn vows. A monastery can kick you out if you don’t obey. The military can prosecute you if you don’t obey.

If you volunteer to join the military or a monastery, either way, you are making a solemn, witnessed vow of obedience… within a community… that operates with a hierarchy… that enforces a schedule.

Remember the metaphor of the rider and the elephant? Communities that require obedience and have the means to enforce it, get lots of riders and elephants in line, quickly.

Also, there is something that monastics and the military DON’T have to deal with, that we ordinary mortals do.

And that is care-work.

Monastics in contemplative communities don’t have care-giving responsibilities for young children or aged parents.

Military personnel, when they are deployed or on duty, are also not simultaneously running relatives to doctor’s appointments, trying to launch a marketing campaign, picking up kids from soccer practice.

Monks and nuns in those communities are not also single-handedly, simultaneously trying to juggle: full-time jobs, bill-paying, house maintenance, car maintenance, commutes, care-giving, grocery shopping, bathroom cleaning, yard work.

But me?

And probably, you?

We are lone riders, on big elephants.

We don’t have the structure of a whole community behind us, to prod our elephants into following a schedule. Most of us also don’t have the luxury to simply delegate entire, extremely demanding life areas like care work.

So, because we don’t have the external structure, we need instead to rely on patience, grace, humility, a sense of humor, friendliness toward ourselves (and our elephants) and our own willingness to reflect and innovate… until we do, eventually, in time, come up with a schedule that the rider and elephant both agree on.

Secret Sauce for Individuals: Three Times a Week Counts As “Daily”

Time management expert Laura Vanderkam — who, with five kids, is intimately familiar with the demands of juggling work tasks and home tasks — proposes a rule that doing something three times a week, counts as a habit.

In other words: if you manage to meditate three times most weeks, consider yourself a meditator.

If you can manage to do that ONE thing, three times a week — and by week, I mean an ordinary, routine week, not a travel week, a week where anyone is sick, a week with intense work demands — consider this experiment a success.

If you decide to try this, to work out a daily schedule for yourself where you are including something that sustains you but that is NOT task or chore-related; the main thing is to have patience, and remember that this schedule is supposed to serve you; you are not here to serve it.

And, if it doesn’t work for you, and you abandon the schedule — consider that a success, too.

You tried it, you learned something. This is always a win.

Structure is not for everybody.

Lots of people live wonderful lives, without bothering with written schedules. You may be one of them.

But for me, I have found this practice of keeping a schedule set up around NOT working, set up around making time and space for the important-but-not-urgent, to be transformative.

It’s also cumulative.

I started very, very small. This practice of keeping (and revising, and reworking) a schedule is the most important spiritual discipline I follow; the one that supports all the rest.

John Mabry, a spiritual guide, asked his client Sandra what it was like for her to work out her own daily schedule, that prioritized important but not urgent things.

She said she didn’t follow it rigidly, sometimes didn’t follow it at all, and she still kept changing and revising it.

He asked if it had been helpful.

“Oh yes,” she said.

“It really helped me focus. I never woke up with that feeling of vertigo, you know, that ‘what the hell do I do now?’ feeling. I always knew what I was going to do next, even if I chose in the moment not to do it.”

“It … held me.”

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References

Conley, M. (2022) ‘This is a rant about beds at work’, homeculture by Meg Conley, 13 December. Available at: https://homeculture.substack.com/p/this-is-a-rant-about-beds-at-work (Accessed: 14 December 2022).

Mabry, J.R. (2006) Noticing the Divine: An Introduction to Interfaith Spiritual Guidance. Morehouse Publishing. Quote from Sandra: Kindle location 2742

‘A Christmas Day Plan – Rhoneisms’ (2018, 3 December). Available at: https://www.patrickrhone.net/a-christmas-day-plan/ (Accessed: 20 December 2022).