How to audit your time (and center aliveness in your day)
What does your calendar look like today?
If it’s packed to the brim, what have you filled it with? Or if it’s empty, what will you do with your time? (And do you find an empty calendar blissful or a source of heightened anxiety?)
I admit: I like being busy.
A color-coded calendar, filled with 6-7 items in a day feels cozy to me – a container that can hold the daily actions that make up a life. You can ask my partner (or my therapist, for that matter): having things on my calendar matters quite a bit to me.
But I also know that unintentional busyness drives me to feeling disconnected and out-of-control.
When my calendar gets packed with unwanted or mundane tasks – added by myself or my employer or both – I begin to feel rudderless fairly quickly: like I’m just bashing from thing to thing. By the end of the day, I’m cranky, completely lacking in patience, and likely full of snack food quickly grabbed off the shelf.
Needless to say, this is not how I want to show up in the world.
I want my days to be filled with purpose, with tasks and actions I choose to do, and that support me in being present and engaged in my communities.
So here’s a tool I use every couple weeks to assess whether the tasks I have on my calendar actually need to be on my calendar – and just how important they are for me.
The Busyness Matrix
Developed by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, this is one of several variations of The Eisenhower Matrix I use in my day-to-day life.
It helps me to “right-size” my task list and get a better understanding of what is mine to do (and when to do it.)
How it works:
1. Create a list of the tasks and activities you have on your calendar.
2. Plot each one on the following matrix, based on how meaningful and relevant it is for you. Some questions that might help:
Meaningful: How alive does this task make you feel? (This isn't the perfect question, but I've found my sense of aliveness is highly connected to my sense of meaning.)
Relevant: How connected is this task to your personal/professional goals?
3. Assess each task based on its quadrant:
Irrelevant/Meaningless: Can you reduce or get rid of any of these tasks?
Relevant/Meaningless: Can you delegate some of these or reduce the amount of time spent on them?
Irrelevant/Meaningful: Can you schedule these for times when they’ll feel recharging or relaxing?
Relevant/Meaningful: Have you planned enough time for this to feel good and energy-filled?
Looking at my calendar and the tasks/activities I know are ahead of me, here are some examples from my life:
Irrelevant/Meaningless: Doing the annual audit of our work department’s closet inventory.
Relevant/Meaningless: Attending my company's weekly staff meeting. 🫠
Irrelevant/Meaningful: Listening to the How Stuff Works podcast.
Relevant/Meaningful: Going to the YMCA with the kids or using Resistbot to message my Senators.
However you like your calendar – packed, empty, or somewhere in between – this might be a helpful exercise to support you in being more choiceful and intentional with your time.
(For example, I just decided to skip the annual closet audit and fully assume nobody will notice. 😃)
