Margins.
If you're anything like me, you've ended some of your days exhausted, rung out like a wet rag. The day started at a hundred miles an hour and you never had a chance to catch your breath, so that by the time your head hits the pillow, you're beat.
Hobbies? Books? Chats with your wife? Those are dreams of a future where things are slower, where you have more time.
And you don't even know where the time went—it just felt like things were back to back to back, running from one thing to the next.
I know, because for the first thirteen years of my marriage, I lived like this. As soon as we got married, we became youth workers in a synagogue. But that wasn't a full time job (or at least didn't pay like one) so we both got full time jobs as well. Our days were spent at work and our evenings and weekends were spent ... at work.
Amongst those tumultuous first years, I also got a degree, qualified as a rabbi (at the same time), whilst still having a full time job and having a kid. When I say that we were hamsters on a neverending wheel of doom, I don't lie.
From there, we moved countries (with two kids), I qualified for another ordination (8 extremely grueling tests in five years), got a masters, and then had three more kids.
We then left said country on a three year mission, where life with a community of 850 people didn't slow down for one second. Our weekends were still spent at work, but this time during the week we were parenting older children and ministering to the community (including 100 funerals in five years).
Thirteen years of hustle and grind. You can imagine how this must have felt, but coming from a military background, I thought this was how you got things done. You worked until you were numb, came back the next day and did it again.
But there is another way to live, and it's one that, had I known about it, could have saved a lot of soul ache. And it's something you can do right now.
It's called "margins".
Every system has a capacity, a maximum amount of work it can do, information it can process, packages it can deliver, whatever, in a given time frame. A good system designer will build in some margin, much like your mom always bought shoes a size too big so you'd have room to grow.
Margin is there so that when things get hectic, the system doesn't break. This also saves on wear and tear in the system, as it's always working at a given amount below maximum.
I didn't know about systems and margins and capacity. I didn't think of myself as a holistic being, as a complex system. I didn't know that, unlike mechanical systems, organic systems vary in their capacities over time—one day more, the next less. So I just operated at maximum, all day every day.
Returning from that mission, and having more margin, more free-time, in my system, gave me the ability to see that I desperately needed to slow down, to build in more slack, more margin, more room.
I'd wager that, if you haven't yet figured out what I did only recently, you probably need to add in more margin too.
Life is too dynamic to predict with any accuracy—every day brings with it new challenges and things you need to react to. If you're at full capacity, or you're scheduled at full capacity, or you're budgeted at full capacity, the system will inevitably break at some point from being overstretched. Sometimes these breaks will be small (eg your mood) and sometimes they'll be bigger (eg your health, your relationships).
Where could you build margin into your system?