Schedules are designed to support how we want to live our lives. Schedules are a tool for us to manage time. And time… well, it’s a nonrenewable resource. By that, I mean, we cannot create time that we have already spent. Time is not something we can get more of. It just keeps ticking away. Money, we can make. Energy, we can build. And headspace, we can create. But of all the resources we need, we invest, we use, we protect, time is the one resource we just cannot make more of.
So we create schedules. It helps us make the most of our time. And if we stick with our schedules, hopefully we can get the things we want done done.
However, inevitably, schedules become more important than us. Our schedules start to drive how we do things and how we interact with people, especially our children. Somehow, as parents, we feel that routines and schedules are more important than how we or our children are feeling at the moment. We sleep less than we need, we rush our kids when they are deeply in the middle of enjoying something, and we get stressed as we look at the ticking numbers on our watch.
Don’t get me wrong. I love schedules. And I am a huge stickler for being on time. I hate making people wait and I respect other people’s time, just as I hope they respect mine. My husband is even more on the extreme. He likes to be early. He gets stressed if he thinks he might be late. Some of this can probably be traced to how we were raised and how seriously our parents took routines and schedules to be. So we have a bit of a complex when it comes to time and being on time.
However, I’m just saying that it can cause us a lot of strife and angst if we let schedules enslave us.
Sherry Yuan Hunter 