Responsible scheduling is self-care

One thing that’s coming up a lot at the moment is a feeling of overload now things are opening back up. 

For lots of small business owners and freelancers, we’ve only just found (some kind of) our groove working from home, and now there is a lot of other ‘stuff’ back in the mix. The pub! A coffee shop! Shopping! Yoga! The gym! All great stuff, but after over a year of pandemic fatigue to deal with, it’s a lot. How do you make it all fit in? 

I remember hearing something when I first started teaching yoga that said not over booking yourself is self-care. In the context of teaching yoga that meant leaving time between your classes to get where you needed to go, decompress and arrive at your next appointment fresh and full of energy, rather than late and flustered.  

It’s great advice, and something I’m coming back to now in the context of being a human, parent and small-business owner. I’ve only ever worked for myself full time during lockdown, so I’ve never had to content with the lure of doing other stuff while I planned to work. But as more options come back in to play I’m trying to remember to give myself at least a 15 minute buffer to play with AND I’m trying hard not to fill that buffer with tiny tasks like scrolling the internet or checking my emails.

I wonder why we feel the need to be busy? To over-schedule and overbook to the point of stress? Is it help us feel worthy and ‘busy’ or maybe because being alone with our thoughts is sometimes hard. 

I read a great Instagram post recently that said I don’t want to be fully booked – I want to be responsibly scheduled. You don’t need to be busy or stressed to be important. And sometimes doing less is really doing more.