If you live and die by your calendar
I recently attended a three-day silent retreat. The retreat schedule was meticulously planned by the organisers, detailing timings, activities and locations. The schedule was printed and stuck on the doors of our rooms, the gathering hall, and the kitchen.
I noticed something interesting: whenever there was a deviation from the schedule, even a slight one, my mind went into overdrive. If the facilitator started the meditation 15 minutes after the scheduled time because the talk overran, I kept looking at the clock thinking, “Isn’t it time for the meditation?”
You might think, “Siri, that’s because you are into meditation!”
Well, I meditate every day, but it is not something I really look forward to with sprightly enthusiasm. Actually, the talks and discourses are the highlights of every retreat. There are stories, anecdotes, teachings and other things that stimulate the intellect. Whereas meditation can be really uncomfortable, difficult, boring and dull – it was for me!
So, when the talk overran, I felt a small flicker of excitement that it was cutting into meditation time, but the “scheduler” part of my mind kept thinking, “But you are cutting into the meditation schedule. If you start the meditation late, would you extend the time for the meditation or finish at the designated time?”
We had many empty hours between the meditation sessions with nothing to do—no reading, talking, or writing. We had surrendered our phones and had no digital devices with us.
So it was interesting to notice that even when there was nothing to do and nowhere to go, my mind was focused on the times when the schedule was slightly off track.
I read the schedule at least four times every day to ensure I was sticking to it! It shouldn’t have mattered, but to me it did.
This is the dark side of scheduling. Our minds don’t like deviations, especially in situations where we don’t have much control. The retreat was an uncomfortable environment. It was my first silent retreat in seven years, and my last experience was challenging.
The theme of the retreat was self-inquiry, and we were practising shaking down the solid notion of “I” we create around ourselves, which veils our true nature. In one sense, I was disassembling my sense of identity through self-inquiry. This was a lot of change, which can be very challenging for the mind. The mind likes predictability, and familiar things are predictable.
So, I clung to the comfort of the schedule so that I could have a sense of order and power in my own world. As the retreat progressed, I saw how attached I was to the sense of order in my external schedule and how even a small disruption was causing a volcanic eruption inside my mind.
I reflected back to my corporate days when my schedule was packed with back-to-back meetings. If one meeting overran or if one thing went haywire in my schedule, the entire day would go out of hand.
What worked during the retreat was the empty space between the sessions. We had a minimum of 1.5 hours to 4 hours of empty space between the sessions. There was ample time to just be and not rush from one task to another.
After being burnt out by back-to-back meetings (sometimes 13 meetings in a day) during the peak of the pandemic, I started carving out time in my calendar and marking it as “blocked.” Sometimes, I would carve 3 hours in my working day. This gave me enough breathing space to handle unexpected events, chaos and disasters without my sanity going out of hand.
If there was no chaos to handle, it gave me time to sit and do my actual work (which was separate from the meetings and the busy work). This led to a better work-life sanity for me.
This is a lesson I am taking away in my work now, too. I schedule minimal calls during the day—a maximum of two client calls—and the rest of the day is free for me to read, think, write, and reflect.
Do you have empty spaces in your calendar? Have you blocked it so that it is unavailable to others?
Let me know if you have experienced the dark side of scheduling too.
đź’ŚSiri
P.S. If you are feeling stuck in your career right now and would like to figure a way forward, I invite you to book a 45 minute, “no-obligation” discovery session with me. If you know a friend who could use this free session, please forward them this email and link!
