What if Your Schedule was an Escher drawing?

M.C. Escher. Genius. Inspiration. He turned all kinds of objects into shapes that we hadn't seen them in before, and he really did it brilliantly. The elegance of the way he fits things together is mesmerizing.

Linear traditional thought would have us believe that our schedules exist in blocks of time, like those black and white square and rectangular fields in "Day and Night" -- Escher's print above. (In case the name M. C. Escher doesn't ring a bell with you, I've linked some articles about him, at the end of this article.)

We were taught block scheduling at school, and many people manage to make a blocky schedule work very effectively for their time management in, say, a job, or juggling multiple meetings. Here's a great example of a typical day planner, thinking in blocks of time, from https://rachelrosaliedesign.ecwid.com

Block scheduling works great, to a point. But what about when it gets three times busier? How do you make everything fit?

Ideally, you trim down the busy-ness. But sometimes there are good reasons to make more fit. To follow your passions, for example, on top of a "full-time" job.

Enter the tessellation. Stop thinking that time lives in rectangles. Sure, an hour is an hour, but some hours during the day, as we all know, seem to pop into a bubble of nothing when we look back, whereas in other hours we seem to somehow get 8 hours of work done. Time is like that -- it's not linear! It's expandable and compressible and multi-taskable.


Now I know that some people multi-task better than others. Some people think they don't multi-task at all. :)
 But I think they might be multi-tasking, or capable of multi-tasking, more than they have realized.


Schedules have all kinds of snippets in them that allow you to put 120% in a 100% container.
(And plenty of people take a 100% rectangle and only put about 60% in them, with plenty of wasted time).

An interesting fact that busy people know is that if you are filling your time with things that fire you up -- helping people in a way that revs you, or connecting with people that you truly enjoy, or working on a  project that feels worthwhile -- then working hard doesn't make you tired. It fills you with energy.

        Case in point -- I'm writing this article late at night, but I want to do this more than I want to sleep, because once I have an idea for a LinkedIn article, it takes hold of me until I attend to it, or, I regret not getting it done in a timely way. That's passion.

They say that when a writer (such as myself) is at a full writing gallop, our minds work very much like the minds of schizophrenics. So multi-tasking may come more easily to me than it does to you. Nonetheless, I think to some degree, we can all train ourselves to tesselate our schedule, just like Escher's birds, there.

It might not go smoothly, and now and then we'll realize we are doing too much and we have to pull back. But the fact remains that there are lots of gaps in a block of time if we are excited enough about something to find them and use them.

For example, start sorting your tasks by "small" and "large" and start fitting the small ones in the little holes that pop up during the day. For example, perhaps phone calls or e-mails for business development for your side business can slide in between meetings. This may seem unrealistic at first -- too much weight on the brain! -- but once an intention is set and you try it out, you might be surprised how well it works.

Sometimes things don't all get done during the day, but you let your brain percolate on them anyway. When you let your brain percolate on tasks, sometimes they take care of themselves -- for example, the person you meant to phone, phones you. Or when you do finally sit down to write that e-mail, you find that it only takes five minutes because it's been in the back of your mind for three days.

Or, in another mental exercise, sort your tasks into "must do for job" and "must do for passion." If your side job is something that feeds you enthusiasm, then it's worth allocating time to! Figure out how to do that.
Think of this phrase:

If you want something done, ask a busy person.

How is it that busy people get more done? Simply by believing that it can be done, I think. Busy people know how to make their phone calls in the small bird's-beaks of time in those rectangular blocks of time. And they're excited to do so, so they find the time.

I'm not saying it's an easy transformation, to start thinking of your block schedule as having holes that can accept more stuff, but I am saying that it's possible.

It's also a matter of mental focus. Sometimes we can't tesselate, and that's okay. Just keep chugging patiently along the yellow brick road until you see a little space where you can sneak some time in for those other tasks you're preparing for.

Plant the seed in your mind that you WILL have time to get to the things that matter to you, when the time is right -- and then look for that opportunity.
Seek and you will find!

You have all the time you want and need to do everything you want and need to do.

And that's the truth.