RAISING CLARITY on Structuring Your Day

09 Apr RAISING CLARITY on Structuring Your Day

RAISING CLARITY on Structuring Your Day: A detail of the famous sculpture, “The Thinker,” by Auguste Rodin at the Rodin Museum in Paris.

RAISING CLARITY on Structuring Your Day

Structuring Your Day = Sculpting Your Life

Our niche is peaceful, ethical moneycoaching and fundraising consulting. That implies structuring your day. Structuring your day is sculpting your life. If you want to learn more about why this is important, and what it has to do with abundance, read this post.

Time is Not Money, It’s Much More Valuable

In our coaching, we often find the true issue isn’t money at all, it’s time. Our clients want more time; they could often care less about more money. They just use money to buy time. (That’s why we say one easy way to save money and get more time is to stop buying what’s already yours.)

Structure and Abundance

Last week, we published an important piece on the relationship between structure and abundance. We also named an uncomfortable truth:

Abundance and chaos are the exact same thing: flow.

Chaos = Abundance = Flow

If you want flow, and most folks do, you have to be open to the totality of the flow. Flow is flow; we don’t get to filter flow. It’s not the Universe’s job to make our lives perfect, unless “perfect” means totally accepting of what is.

So Much New Now! Structure It!

Right now, folks have a lot of chaos coming to them. A lot of new is coming in: our

• • personal finances and worklife, and the global economy, are changing
  • physical world has shrunk
  • emotional lives are ramping up
  • spiritual lives (for those who have them :)) ) are blasting open.

Structure Helps Accommodate What’s New

Many people are telling you what to do right now. How to make the most of this time. It’s just more newness. It’s more new information, new behaviors, new thoughts to have. That’s all fine. But where do you put it? What do you do with it? And more importantly, when in the heck do you do it? What does your day even look like right now?

Structure is Time-Sculpting

That’s where RAISING CLARITY comes in. TIME is what most of us are confused about; money comes second. Abundance is working with the flow we have because whatever we appreciate, appreciates. (Thank you, Lynne Twist.) This can look sometimes like divine cruelty. It’s just the way the Universe seems to work.

But this isn’t a post on accepting and appreciating what’s coming in–whether you see it as abundance or chaos.

This is a post on structuring your time and shaping your life to contain it, direct it, channel it in, and move it out so you become the true vessel of everything you want to be and manifest in this world.

Structure Ninjas Are A Thing

I’m a structure ninja. Give me a big job, and I’ll chunk it up for you. Give me five minutes, and after having a baby in the middle of my doctoral program, I’ll show you a completed dissertation and a PhD. I have the institutional memory of an elephant. My inbox is foolproof. And I know when to say no. I even know when to procrastinate! (Many of these things are covered in this category.)

Here’s How: The Three Things to Think About When You Structure

One:

Your structure doesn’t have to look like what they told you in school or at home it was supposed to look like. All 24 hours of every single day belong to you to structure.

Two:

Tight and loose both count as structured. It just has to work for you–really work, so nothing falls through the cracks and you have the time you want for everything. A lot of people think this is structure:

French-style garden at Villandry Castle, France. Image by sybarite48.

and this is not:

English-style garden at Utsunomiya University,Utsunomiya, Japan, by Hasec.

but they are both structure! Notice that a garden is a structure we create within the world of physical form. Both of these pictures are gardens! Any structure that works for you counts.

Three: Create structure that is truly organic to you–here is how:

Design:

What do you want to do with your time? Embrace it all. Set aside times for each. Including for unstructured time! I set aside two days a week that are unstructured. I owe nothing to anyone on those days. Often, I set aside an additional hour or 15 minutes or evening…I love unstructured time with a passion. To me, it is defined (again) as time I owe nothing to anyone, without harming my productivity, commitments, life balance, health. I’m getting everything done that I want to get done, and have time left over I can do whatever I want with, without guilt.

• • • • Ninja secret: Overbudget. Overestimate the amount of time things will take. (As you go along, you will observe how long they really take.)
      • Ninja edge: Learn what times of day/evening are best for you for each type of thing you do and want to do. Learn what kind of time you need for them; learn what time of day or evening you most enjoy them and do them best.
        • For example, for me, mornings are off-limits to anyone; they are for the Five Tibetan Rites, meditation, reading, tea, and fruit. I actually, honestly, say “no” to meetings that take place within what I consider the morning.
        • Another example: writing for me is best at certain times of day/evening and even before and after certain things. It’s much harder for me to write after I am burned out from lots of emailing and meetings. It’s not enjoyable for me to write early in the morning, though writer friends swear by early morning writing. Plus, I choose different kinds of time to do different kinds of writing: blogging, grantwriting, letters to friends. Each has its own best time(s) of day or evening.

Test

Try out your structure. Live it for a week or two. Keep note of what worked and didn’t, either in your head or if you are like me, in writing.

Redesign

Tweak your structure based on what you noticed worked and what didn’t.

• • • • Ninja secret: Set aside time in your schedule one week or two after you do step a. above to redesign.
      • Ninja edge: Knowing you will tweak and adjust makes you freer to experiment. This builds self-trust. It means your bossy self doesn’t have all the control. It equalizes power within you, among your various selves

Test

Enjoy

Get Frustrated

This is a good thing. You are changing as you structure your day. Your life is changing shape. You are shaping your life. It is time to restructure. Your life can reflect your new changes. Probably, you have gained more conscious control of your time, more consciousness about who you want to spend your time with and what you want to spend your time doing. Great! Your old structure doesn’t fit anymore.

Redesign

See the steps above.

Test

“

Repeat

Pretty much forever; it’s an upward, ever-better-fitting-you spiral.

That’s it! May you, too, become a structure ninja.