I stumbled upon the concept of margin while reading a post by Michael Hyatt, which led me to design my ideal week. Richard Swenson, MD (who wrote the book: Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives) scribes margin like this:

Margin is the space between our load and our limits. It is the amount allowed beyond that which is required. It is something helped in reserve for contingencies or unanticipated situations. Margin is the gap between rest and expansion, the space between breathing freely and suffocating.

Last year I wrote about why booking too far in advance can be dangerous for your business, and this concept of margin so eloquently captures what I had recognized had been my problem: I was so booked up with clients that I was born any margin for error, growth, planning, or reflection. I wasn-t really growing my business in a sustainable way; I was just booking one customer after the next. At the time this seen like a good thing: doesn't grow my business mean getting more customers?

Long redesign.

What if instead of booking up to 100% capacity (which more often than not ends up being closed to 120%), we only booked up to an 80% capacity?
What if we left more room for growth (personal or professional) and stopped being one with "busy-ness"?
I spent shortly a year tuning down every new project (and even getting rid of old ones) so that I could reduce my workload, built in more margin, and create what is now Digital Strategy School. It takes time to build margin into your schedule.Write a book. Create a program. Update your contracts and proposals (which has been on your to-do list for how long..?) Spend more time with your family. Go above and beyond for a client. Learn something new. Currently following through on the things that have been swimming at you for a long time.

When you design your ideal week, you start to see that the time you think you have is often not in alignment with how much time you currently have.

After designing my ideal week, I had a much cleaner idea of how to create a framework for my week that would empower me to feel more focused by timing days of the week, and even parts of the day. SO simple, I know. Some of you have been doing this for ages and you-re-already a pro, and some of you who know my schedule said "Wow, that's so rigid, I need more flexibility!"

Structureable flexibility.

If you are not sure how much time you are currently spending on various tasks, use a tool like Rescue Time (their free version is excellent!) which runs in the background and tracks where your time is being shot. It can even send you weekly reports so you know exactly how much time you were on Facebook, or shoot in your email box! You can assign different websites or programs/applications on a scale of very disctracting to very productive, so you can see at a glancing things like: which days of the week you are most productive, which times of the day you are most productive, and the sites on which you are spending the most distracting time. Turns out I so instead of trying to hackle highly creative work first thing in the morning, I handle it in the afternoon, when I know I

Creating more margin has been game-changing for my business.
What would be possible for yours?