The Power of Structure
This year, I hit the ground running in my business and in life. For the first few weeks of 2021, I felt enlivened and excited for the year ahead. Lots of ideas and connections were coming to me and it felt like a tidal wave.
I was excited by the surge of energy and got swept up in the flow of so many things happening. I launched my podcast. I joined Clubhouse. I launched my website. I started planning coaching programmes and services. I wrote down pages and pages of things I wanted to achieve or review in my business and in life. I wanted to do them all at once and I was all over the place.
I started to feel overwhelmed and lost in the maelstrom; drowning in the magnitude of everything that was happening. I was flicking from thing to thing in a constant battle to keep all the plates in my life spinning at once. A part of me believed that trying to contain all of this creativity was limiting.
It all took me back to an incident with my father more than 25 years ago. I was a couple years out of university and floundering about. I tried this and that, lived here and there, but I didn’t stick with anything. I thought that deciding on one thing would limit and constrict me.
I was considering graduate schools and asked my father about law school. He worked as a lawyer though later transitioned into politics, lobbying and ministry. He told me that law school provided a structure for learning, like the frame of a building upon which you could construct whatever you wanted.
I went to law school, worked as a lawyer and have been on the move ever since. There are times when I fight against structure and think that it limits and constricts me. And then there are times, like now, when I realise that structure is only as limiting or constricting as I make it. And like a building foundation, structure can actually allow great freedom.
I recently looked at that growing list of things I want to achieve and create and I chose to break it down into four basic pillars — My Business; My Podcast; My Writing; My Life. So each morning (or the night before), I decide how many hours I am going to allocate to each pillar.
The real power in this structure is creating blocks of time for each activity. So, the first hour of my day may be dedicated to My Life with meditation, a workout and just starting my day. The next two or three hours may be dedicated to My Business with a client, sending emails or taking care of admin. And so on throughout the day.
The daily structure is just a foundational guide. It lets me build from there and allows a lot of freedom within the blocks of time. I also build some buffer time in to allow for variance. But if I am still working on the same thing 15 minutes past the hour, I know it’s time to wrap up and move on to the next pillar.
Choosing how I structure and allocate my time in blocks gives me so much awareness and learning that I think it deserves its own blog post. So check back again soon! I’ll end this with an observation that choosing what is important to you and how you divide your finite time within those choices is a structure for freedom, not limitation.
