Margin

"An amount of something included so as to be sure of success of safety"

The concept of margin has been on my mind a lot recently.

It started when I heard an excellent speaker talk about the importance of having financial margin in one's life. As he described the concept to the group, he was trying to describe the importance of having enough financial buffer in one's life that they could handle the natural ebbs and flows of life. More specifically, he was trying to describe having enough margin of error that when the unexpected ultimately happened, a person or family would have enough financial to be able to weather the unexpected storm.

In the financial world, we would describe this as an Emergency Fund. Dave Ramsey devotes two of his "7 Baby Steps" to creating an emergency fund that would allow someone to weather the unexpected financial hiccups that inevitably happen to all of us. (No one, no matter how good at budgeting they might become, can expect every blown engine, air conditioning failure, or unexpected expense pop up.) The wise create safety nets.

I've also seen that the concept of margin can and should be pressed into other areas of our life. Certainly if we can create financial margin, the weight of the unexpected begins to lighten.

One of the biggest areas that I have seen failure in my own life in the past is creating margin in my time. Like most in America, it has become exceedingly easy to get fully booked, even double and triple booked, without even batting an eye. I've found that this puts ourselves and our families under incredible strain and stress.

Most of the time, the things that consume our time are good things. They may even be great things. We rarely choose to spend our time on things that we don't believe to be good and fruitful for our lives or the lives of loved ones. However, this pursuit of lots of good things ultimately burns us out. We simply are unable as human beings to run 24/7/365. Our pastor at church often says, "if you're burning your candle at both ends, you're not shining as brightly as you think you are." We just aren't able to give fully of ourselves to our family, work and friends if our schedules are packed.

I believe letting some things go to be a good and wise thing to do.

I think this becomes daunting for most. I know it did for me. What among all of these great things am I supposed to cut. How can I cut out my friends or cut back at work? It just doesn't seem possible.

I've found that the better way to approach this is choosing what to put in. Simply put, I set everything up with priorities, place them in my schedule and when it is full, it is full.

For instance, this is how I might prioritize my 24 day.

1. 8 hours of sleep
2. 4 hours of family time
3. 2 hours of personal time (gym, reading, etc.)
4. 10 hours of work/travel time

Simply put, if something doesn't fit in this schedule then I probably need to consider cutting back from my lowest priority, work and travel. For others it may be personal time. I don't know what it is for each person. However, I do know that for me, this is the order of my priorities.

If I don't get 8 hours of sleep, everything below it: family time, personal time, work, it will all suffer because I didn't take care of myself first. It's similar to the airplane oxygen masks. Every time, without fail, the flight attendants tell the entire cabin, secure your oxygen mask before helping anyone around you. Simply, there's no way you can be your best self, without taking care of yourself first.

After that, it's about building in a little free time, time that you don't know how it's going to shake out, but you do know that it's available for emergency. In fact, my 24-day may look slightly more like this:

1. 8 hours of sleep
2. 4 hours of family time
3. 1.5 hours of MARGIN TIME
4. 1.5 hours of personal time
5. 8.5 hours of work/travel time.

I hope this is an encouragement to you.