Today I’m in the midst of a new design project to address the inhale-exhale question. I am experimenting with the structure of my 2016 calendar so that it can be an affordance for both exhaling and inhaling.
Instead of my more familiar habit of fitting things into my schedule as they arise, I’m pre-designing deep grooves to follow – tracks and paths and roads written into time that guide me towards certain kinds of activity, much as the streets of a city guide us from place to place. There will be days to work and days to learn, days to exert myself fully and days to rest. There will be cycles of weeks and months that are dedicated to bringing about both breathing in and breathing out.
I intend to use the design as a scaffold – a way of determining what to say yes and no to which speaks to a bigger commitment than my more usual in-the-moment decision making can express.
Sometimes we need something big enough to hold us in this way if we want our lives to be an expression of what we care about.
And I simply have to do this. Without it, despite my best intentions, I easily find myself in the middle of periods of intensity, born of many projects reaching fruition simultaneously, that are simply beyond my physical capacity. I’m left ragged and depleted, unable to contribute in the way I wish.
The idea that a calendar could – like the layout of a city – be structured intentionally to guide me into a more vibrant engagement with my work and my wider life came to me when I took part in the RSA’s recent Street Wisdom project with this very question in mind. As I learned to look at London through new eyes, I came to see how the streets serve to bring us together or hold us apart, speed us up, slow us down, and guide us towards and away from destinations and experiences.
I saw how different buildings can be when built with care and patience or when thrown together ad-hoc, responding to changing needs as they arise. I found out that different streets have different moods, different paces. And I saw clearly how space frees by limiting. The enabling constraints of geography make it impossible to build too many buildings in one spot without creating a mess – a constraint that is much harder to see when planning our time.
And because of all of this I’m approaching my 2016 calendar as an experiment in the street architecture of time.
I’m excited. I’ve never seen time this way before.
I’ll let you know what happens.
You can find daily writings from Justin at his blog, On Living and Working