(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)
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There's a particular kind of optimism that happens when we look at an empty calendar, isn't there? You know the feeling. A new month, a fresh week, maybe even a brand new planner. Suddenly, we believe we are capable of things that apparently no human being has ever done before.
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We're going to exercise five days a week, cook healthy meals, answer every email, finish the big project, spend meaningful time with the people we love, keep the house organized, read more, pray more, sleep eight hours a night, and apparently never need to sit down. And then real life shows up. And by Wednesday, we're eating crackers over the kitchen sink, wondering what happened to the woman who made the beautiful schedule on Sunday night.
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If that sounds familiar, this episode is for you. Welcome to Goals and Grace. I'm Rev. Dr. Juliet Spencer, Certified High Performance Coach, and I'm known as the Decision Architect because I equip people to stop letting life make their decisions for them and start intentionally designing a life around what matters most.
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This is part three of our Clarity to Commitment, a late summer reset series. We started by getting honest about where we are and where we want to go. Then we moved from clarity into commitment.
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Today, we make that commitment practical because a decision that never reaches your calendar is usually just a good intention. We say all kinds of things matter to us. Our health matters.
Our marriage matters. Our faith matters. Our family matters.
The book we want to write matters. The business we want to grow matters. Rest matters.
Friendships matter. But eventually, what matters has to compete for actual space in a 24-hour day. And that's where things get interesting.
Your calendar is one of the most honest documents you own. It's honest because our calendars reveal what consistently gets access to us. Let me say that again.
It's honest because our calendars reveal what consistently gets access to us. Who gets our time? Who gets our best energy? What gets squeezed into whatever is left over? And what just keeps getting postponed? Craig Greshel uses a phrase I love. Schedule your values.
Think about that. Isn't that great? Schedule your values. Not just your appointments or your obligations and not even just the things that other people are asking of you.
Schedule your values. If I tell you that my health matters to me, but there's never any space on my calendar to take care of my body, then eventually my calendar tells the truth. If I tell you my marriage matters, but husband consistently receives whatever time and energy are left after everyone else has had access to me, my calendar tells the truth.
If I tell you my relationship with God is foundational to my life, but time with God is perpetually relegated to if I can get to it, my calendar tells the truth. And if I tell you that a particular goal matters to me, but week after week I protect no time to pursue it, then you already know my calendar tells the truth. Now this doesn't mean that every value has to appear as a color-coded block on your calendar, but it does mean the way you use your time should bear some resemblance to the life that you say you want to live.
That's why one of the most powerful things you can do this late summer reset is stop asking only, what do I want to accomplish? And start asking, what kind of life would make that accomplishment possible? And those are two very different questions. One of the mistakes that I see people make, and I've certainly made it myself more than once, is creating a schedule for the person we wish we were, instead of for the person we actually are. We plan as though every day will be equally productive, every morning will be perfect, nobody will need anything unexpectedly, technology will always cooperate, and traffic will be reasonable.
We'll never get tired, and our energy will remain at approximately a hundred percent from six in the morning until ten at night. But that's not planning, that's fiction. Good architecture begins with reality.
If you were designing a house you wouldn't ignore the slope of the land and say, but I really wanted the ground to be flat. You'd design with the land you have. Your life deserves the same wisdom.
Pay attention to your natural rhythms. When do you think most clearly? When are you most creative? When are you least creative? When are you patient? When do you need peace and quiet? And when does your energy predictably dip? What commitments are already fixed? And what season of life are you actually in? Managing your time without managing your energy is incomplete. You can technically have an hour available and still not have the mental capacity for the tasks that you've assigned to it.
This is one of the things that I find fascinating about Jesus. He didn't treat every need as an assignment. There were always more people, more needs, more sick, more questions, more demands.
There were more places that he could have gone and yet we read repeatedly that Jesus withdrew. In Luke 5 16 it says, but he would withdraw to deserted places and pray. And I hope you notice that the scripture doesn't say he withdrew after everything had been done and after everyone had been helped.
He withdrew while needs still existed. And that matters. Some of us have unconsciously decided we're only allowed to rest when everything else is finished.
When we've answered all the emails. When everybody in the house or everybody at the office is happy. When the house is clean or the project is complete.
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When nobody needs us anymore for the day. But my friend, that day is not coming. There will always be something else you could do.
Which means rest cannot simply be what happens when the work disappears. Rest has to be one of the decisions you make about how you will do the work. So another way of saying it is you need to architect the week before it architects you.
So here's your practical reset. Before September arrives, I want you to look at a normal week. And I mean truly a normal week.
Not your dream week. Not your vacation week. I want it to be an actual week that anybody who knows you would recognize as a part of your life.
And then I want you to identify four things. First, what deserves your best energy? Now this is really specific because it's not talking just about time, but about your best energy. So what are you wanting to get done that requires the clearest version of you? Maybe it's strategic work or writing.
For some it might be things like preparing for a presentation. Or maybe it's taking time to care for someone. Very specific.
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Maybe it's exercising or spending time with God in prayer. Whatever it is, stop automatically giving your best energy to something that just shouts louder. Second, what needs a boundary? Where are you currently allowing something to expand simply because you haven't decided where it ends? Meetings or email threads, social media, spending time with this particular project, or answering other people's requests.
Remember a boundary isn't punishment. It's architecture. They're what creates rooms.
Third, where will recovery happen? And this, as I've already said, isn't something that you just wait until everything else is finished to your satisfaction. Otherwise it'll be much too easy to skip it. But recovery is essential.
So where are you going to build into your calendar a time for recovery? Maybe you protect an evening or maybe you take a real lunch break. Maybe you stop working at a specific time or perhaps leave white space between appointments. This is something that I did at least one day a week because I knew that especially on a Thursday, I was probably going to get drop-ins.
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So I built in white space to make room for those unexpected appointments. Recovery doesn't have to be extravagant, but it does have to exist. And fourth, what are you willing to leave undone? Now this one might be the hardest one.
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It has been for me from time to time. Designing a meaningful life requires accepting that you can't optimize everything simultaneously. Every yes spends something.
It might be time, energy, attention, money, emotional capacity, or all of the above. So decide consciously what doesn't get your resources right now. The calendar is only a tool.
It's not a master, however. And so I do want to make that very clear. The goal is not to become rigid.
I'm not suggesting that you schedule every 15 minutes of your existence and then panic when someone calls unexpectedly. Your calendar serves you, not the other way around. By the same token, structure can create freedom.
Psalm chapter 90 verse 12 says, So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart. There's something deeply spiritual about acknowledging that our days are limited. It doesn't feel particularly frightening, but it is clarifying.
We don't have unlimited time or unlimited energy, and we don't have unlimited attention. And once we own that, once we accept it, we can stop pretending that everything deserves an equal portion of us, because it doesn't. Some things deserve more and some deserve less.
And some things may not deserve access to us at this season at all. So here's what I want you to do this week. Take out your calendar and find one place where your schedule contradicts what you say matters.
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Pick one thing, one place on your calendar where your schedule contradicts what you say matters. It might be that you say health matters, but you've left no space to move your body. Or maybe you say your marriage matters, but everybody else gets scheduled first.
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Maybe your relationship with God is really important to you, but God ends up receiving whatever exhausted attention remains at the end of the day or the end of the week. You say you're serious about a professional goal, but you haven't really consistently protected time to work on it. Don't redesign your entire life, but make one structural change.
Move one thing or remove one thing. Protect something. Schedule something.
That's what architects do. They don't simply admire the blueprint, they build. And remember this, everyone deserves the opportunity to make a good decision.
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And your best decisions come when you remember that your identity isn't rooted in how much you accomplish. Your identity is rooted in the love of God. Now, next time we're going to talk about something that can make all the difference between a commitment you keep and one that quietly disappears.
And that's something, the people around you. We'll talk about accountability, courageous support, and why the right people don't merely encourage your decisions. They help you become the person capable of making and keeping them.
Until next time, my friend, protect what matters, make the decision your future self will thank you for, and give yourself grace for the rest. I'm Rev. Dr. Juliet Spencer, your decision architect, and may God bless you with goals and grace.
(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)
