Lately, I have found myself vacillating between highly productive days and sheer exhaustion with a healthy dose of mental fog. I am doing a lot of things I am excited about. But I have packed so much into my days that I have practically eliminated any margin from my life.

Many people are overwhelmed, overcommitted, and overworked doing exactly what they thought they wanted to do with their lives.

Cary Nieuwhof (At your Best)

Can you imagine reading a book with no margin? Can you see the words filling entire pages and connecting over the inner joint? Just the thought of this makes me feel slightly overwhelmed. 

I feel just as uncomfortable imagining a long text document formatted as a single, neverending paragraph.  The beauty of margins is that they provide a visual break, a place for our eyes to rest. Margins make the content easier to take in and enjoy.

Similarly, maintaining some margin in our days and weeks can bring our routine to a more sustainable level of intensity and, ultimately, make us feel more at peace in our life.

What is Margin?

Having a margin in life means keeping open spaces within our day and having free time to take breaks and recharge.

A margin is the difference between rest and exhaustion, the gap between our limits and the load we take on. It is the space between breathing freely and suffocating. It is the opposite of overload.

It’s interesting how the concept of margin resonates in specialized fields such as UX design or book design. There, it is referred to as white space or negative space. 

White space is the area between design elements. It is also the space within individual design elements, including the space between typography glyphs (readable characters). […]

People get frustrated when information bombards them. We’re humans, not machines. White space calms us, letting us “breathe”.

Interaction Design Foundation

How fascinating that even in design, we use open spaces to encourage feeling calm and having room to breathe. Shouldn’t we design our lives using the same principle?

And so, creating a margin means intentionally setting aside time and resources beyond what it takes to survive and complete immediate tasks. It is about creating a safety net and allowing ourselves the possibility of not operating at full capacity non-stop.

Creating this breathing room can include making time for self-care, rest, pursuing personal interests, building financial reserves, and learning to protect some of our time and energy.

The Benefits of Having A Margin

Having a margin gives us the open space, flexibility, and ability to manage unexpected situations without feeling overwhelmed or stressed.

A margin allows us to prioritize the important over the urgent. When we have the space and time to reflect on what truly matters, we can make intentional choices about how we spend our time. 

Going back to my earlier example about books, margins help:

• provide room for the reader to hold the book comfortably
• show the entire type block area easily, without “disappearing” into the gutter […]
• give a feeling of openness, making the book inviting to read
• providing space for running heads (or running feet), page numbers or other navigation aids”

The Book Designer

I love seeing these parallels between book design and how we live. In life (just as with books), creating a margin allows us comfort, openness, and space. It keeps us from disappearing into the daily grind and minutiae.

Without margin, we can easily get caught up in responding to urgent requests, handling immediate tasks, never coming up for air, and neglecting or missing out on what matters most – all as we deplete ourselves on the way to inevitable burnout.

What Happens Without Margin

When we operate at absolute capacity, we are stretched thin and have no room for anything unplanned to come up. Getting sick or hurt, a trip to the emergency room, having car problems, finding out that a coworker is leaving for a new job, and other random events can completely derail us. 

When life inevitably throws these unexpected situations at us, we handle them poorly or ignore them until they become a bigger problem to resolve. 

Beyond circumstantial challenges, operating without any margin also means we don’t have enough time to unwind and recharge properly. But unlike robots and machines, people need adequate rest to perform well.

Having no margin in life ultimately leads to stress, overwhelm, burnout, and mental and physical exhaustion. 

When we try to operate from this overwhelmed space, we handle ourselves poorly, lash out at others, our overall attitude deteriorates, and our various outputs suffer. We are no help to ourselves or others. 

Worst of all, the deeper we get into this burnout and exhaustion, the longer we need to recover and return to our better selves.

A lack of margin affects us profoundly and impacts those around us, not only in the present but also in the immediate future, as we work to dig ourselves out of the messes we created.

How to Create Margin

The number one reason that margin gets squeezed out of our lives is that we forget its importance. We think our productivity and outputs will improve if we add one more thing to our plates.

To turn this around, we must first become more aware of our limitations. By remembering that our time, mental capacity, and energy are finite and get depleted, we can make it a priority to recharge properly.

Creating some margin in our days and weeks is crucial so we can continue moving forward.

1. Identify and respect your limits

Considering the time available and your energy limitations, decide how much time you have available for different activities. 

There are 168 hours in a week to accommodate your family/home life, sleep and rest, work, exercise, social events, commuting, and miscellaneous chores.

You also only have so much energy to go around. If you give it all to your work, there will be little left for the people you love and the other essential areas of your life.

Understanding how much time and energy you can dedicate to each category will help you prioritize what is important and say no to the rest.

Here are a few ideas to help you evaluate your time and energy limits:

• How much time do you need to have to rest and recharge?
• How much time do you need for home obligations? How much time do you want to spend with your family?
• How much time do you want to spend on work every week so you have time AND energy to be there for your family?
• How many work meetings can you handle well in one day before your run out of mental and emotional fuel?
• When do you feel the most energized? Are you using that time to do your most important work?
• Based on the meetings you have on your calendar, how much time do you have for independent work?
• Inversely, how much independent time do you need to accomplish your weekly work? Does your meeting schedule allow that? If not, how can you decrease the number of meetings?
• Based on how much time you have allocated for work and your home commitments, what is your availability for social events?

If a long day at work makes you irritable when you go home to your family, you must work on shortening your work days.

If you only have four hours available for social activities, you must decline anything that takes you above this time limit. 

Otherwise, you have to consider what category of your life will get shorted. Do you want your rest, family, or work to suffer in the tradeoff?

2. Create breathing room in your schedule

Start by filling your calendar with your “big rocks.” These are the priority areas of your life. Once the big rocks are in place, you can fill in the other activities as you want. But remember to leave some margin.

Schedule time for rest.

It’s easy for rest to be left out of our schedule because we foolishly believe it will happen when everything else gets done. Not so.

In a culture obsessed with productivity and hustling, there are always more things vying for our time and attention. There is always more we could be doing.

So add rest to your schedule. Put it on your calendar as you would any other commitment. Block some time to go on a walk outside, time to journal, time to read, or time to think.

Whatever activity helps you unwind or recharge should have a dedicated spot on your calendar. Rest should really be one of your big rocks. 

Get places at least 5-10 minutes early.

Give yourself a buffer when you have meetings or appointments. When running on all cylinders, we tend to do things at the last minute. We often get places just in time, if not a few minutes late. It can leave us feeling overwhelmed, hurried, and ill-prepared.

Being 5-10 minutes early can make you feel more poised and organized. As a result, you will feel less stressed and more focused. Being early will give you time to settle in, review materials, and mentally prepare for what’s to come. 

Building in a buffer allows for unexpected delays or issues, giving you the space to address them without being late. It sets the tone for a positive and productive experience. Lastly, being early shows respect and consideration for the person you meet. 

Build in some transition time between activities.

In addition to building some margin around meetings and appointments, plan some transition time throughout your day as you switch between activities and contexts (home versus work versus gym, etc.).

Powering through our days may seem productive, but it leads to diminishing returns when we do not take some time to recharge.

Shorten your meetings by a few minutes so you have a little bit of time to yourself. Add small margins of time as you go from one location to another. Take your lunch break away from your desk.

Give yourself short breaks to grab coffee or water, close open tabs, breathe, catch up on your notes, stretch, look out a window, or better yet, go outside for a moment.

Say no when you mean it.

We have all heard the advice that we need to learn to say “no” more. But how many of us have taken active steps to apply it?

It can be hard to overcome the discomfort of declining requests when we have been conditioned to say yes for years.

The easiest way to implement this advice is to take the time to think through the different types of requests we receive and decide in advance what criteria we will use to determine if they are worth pursuing.

Then, prepare a short script to decline offers and requests that do not meet the requirements. Using a templated script will save you so much time and hesitation.

3. Create Mental Space

Take a break from outside stimuli.

Take short breaks from all external input. A few minutes in silence, away from your phone and computer, can help you reset.

Use this time to meditate, do breathing exercises, or go for a short walk. Or use this time to simply do nothing. Staring out the window so your brain can take a break is a good use of your time.

If you still have a commute, spend a few minutes driving in complete silence. Allow your mind to calm down.

Use the transition time you have inserted in your schedule to pause and unplug from the constant flow of information coming at you.

Develop a reflective practice.

Making reflection a part of our routine can do wonders for your mental space.

Write Things Down.

Have a system for capturing your ideas and keeping track of actionable items. Jot down notes on random things that pop up in your head throughout the day. 

Don’t use your mind for storage. Free up your mental bandwidth for better processing.

You will feel lighter and less anxious when you are not stressed about remembering everything. Outsource the record-keeping to your productivity tools. 

You will feel less frazzled and less anxious when you have more mental margin. You will also have more capacity to respond kindly to yourself and others.

When you have some mental space, you will have more bandwidth to show up as your level-headed, pleasant self.

4. Declutter your physical spaces

A cluttered environment can cause stress, anxiety, and feelings of overwhelm. It also creates more “stuff” we need to take care of.

Research has shown that cluttered spaces can negatively impact cognitive function, making it harder to focus and process information. 

By decluttering and organizing your space, you can create a more calm and peaceful environment that can help reduce stress and promote relaxation. 

A Few Parting Words

If you have bought into hustle culture and if you find yourself obsessed with productivity, the idea of creating some open space in your life might feel uncomfortable at first.

But you wouldn’t use your phone or laptop for days without ever recharging it. You simply couldn’t. What I am suggesting here is that you extend yourself the same grace as you do inanimate objects in your life.

Start small, create some space to breathe, and see how your productivity improves when you have adequate time to rest, recharge and reboot.

So, take a deep breath with me. Won’t you?