Scheduling White Space

Emily Thompson 0:02
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Kathleen Shannon 1:08
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Caitlin Brehm 1:41
So we've talked about this a couple times before, we have a couple blog posts on beingboss.club about scheduling whitespace. And I believe Rene brown even mentioned it in the episode we did with her. But let's dive into it a little bit more specifically, and talk about how you schedule whitespace. And the importance of that in your life in business.

Kathleen Shannon 2:04
I love this one

Emily Thompson 2:07
whitespace makes life worth living.

Kathleen Shannon 2:13
I feel like Emily, you're a pro at whitespace. And your whitespace looks like sitting on your porch.

Emily Thompson 2:18
I does I do though do that a whole lot. But that also has come from, you know, a decade of working so much that I realized that I wasn't happy and I wasn't enjoying my work nor my time outside of work. Because work was so stressful because that's all I was doing. And so I did begin adopting. For me, it started with my Thursdays, so blocking off Thursdays for nothing. And it was a time when I wasn't allowing anything on my schedule at all. So no meetings. And then I could just kind of do what I wanted. So if last minute a friend wanted to have lunch, then I could do it because I had open space to do it. Or if I needed to catch up on task, I could do it because I had open space to do it. But most often it was or it's time for me to just sort of chill, like just sit down and read a book, or, or call up my grandmother and see how she's doing or whatever it may be. So for me having that having that whitespace that really is open for me to do whatever I want to do. And not having a to do list or a calendar dictate how I'm spending my time gave me back my enjoyment of my life and work in ways that I probably am only now beginning to like truly appreciate.

Kathleen Shannon 3:40
Totally I remember whenever Brene brown on episode number 42 was specifically talking about scheduling whitespace I don't think I entirely understood it at the time. Like I got the concept of it, but I wasn't practicing it. And I didn't feel like I needed to practice it. But since then we have written a book we have launched the clubhouse. We have our individual businesses that were rocking out, we do a lot of stuff. And I really feel like especially writing the book on top of everything else filled up any white space that we had. So we were scheduling things in on Thursdays. And once I blocked off, I blocked off three days a week to work on the book. So I remember blocking off Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. And those were absolutely no meeting days. And while we were filling that time with the book, I was probably only I think that we both learned pretty quickly that we only had the capacity to sit down and write for an hour and a half at the at a time after that our minds were kind of busted. But what I really learned about blocking off the whole day as I needed the whole day off to have the energy to put into that 1.5 hours. So that was really interesting and insightful for me. to really feel the difference between energy and time, do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, that makes sense.

Emily Thompson 5:08
For sure, I felt the exact same way. And that, for me really was like a whole other test of whitespace. And I don't even know if I can really dictate that, I guess it is whitespace. I mean, we had planned on working on the book for that day, but did find that we couldn't actually work on the book for a day and get anything of quality out of us for sure. Um, but then having all that extra time, like you need whitespace to be productive and creative in the work time for sure. And that, for us was a consistent and ongoing, like proof, I guess that that's actually exactly the way it works is that you have to have whitespace of just walking around your house or driving to the grocery store, or you know, visiting the aquarium or whatever it may be, to like build up the energy that you can release in that hour and a half or so of work. And I had never done any sort of work before in my life that worked in that way. Usually, I can sit down and bust out six hours without batting an eye. And it doesn't affect me at all. But for some reason who writing that book was so brain intensive that I would be going cross-eyed and like absolutely completely drained after about an hour and a half of working on it. So to see that consistent cause and effect of, of how whitespace affected my work time and how my work time affected my entire day was a really cool insight into how important working whitespace into your ongoing schedule, especially as a creative is absolutely mandatory.

Caitlin Brehm 6:51
It reminds me a lot actually of I mean, we all know that sleep is the necessary recharge for our physical body. And to some degree, our brain, of course, to see you need to sleep in order to repair your muscles and flesh things. I don't know, I'm not a

Emily Thompson 7:08
medical person of your memories. Yeah.

Kathleen Shannon 7:09
But the white experts don't entirely know what does, right, we all know it's important.

Caitlin Brehm 7:16
But white space is almost like sleep for your creative mind. So you need that time to not be actively using it for it to sort of repair itself in a certain way or recharge in a certain way.

Kathleen Shannon 7:30
And also hard thing about white spaces that it feels really frivolous. So even as we were working on the book, knowing that I was really only going to be writing for two hours. I Oh, no. Like I felt like I was being wasteful with my time. And so a struggle that I've been having since wrapping up our first draft and submitting our manuscript to the publisher is that now I want to fill that space. And I am filling that space with things like the work that I had to put off over at braid creative or some of my tasks, building up in my Asana for being Boss, I am able to tackle some of those things that I had to kind of shelve for a few months. But I'm trying to now find the balance of Okay, how do I bring whitespace back into the mix post book? And how do I keep from filling that all up?

Emily Thompson 8:23
For sure. And I think this is where like hardcore boundaries come in. Because especially after I became so aware of the advantages of whitespace, I realized where I do, or I was already incorporating tons of whitespace into my life with, you know, the weekends that we do not let work touch or the fact that neither of us are going to respond to anything after 5pm. And so those sort of blocks of times outside of that boundary of work are whitespace more or less for us. I don't know what you're like with like scheduling life things like we have a home calendar or we have like, you know, climbing practice or like trips, we're going on those sorts of things. But even then I'm super particular about what I allow on my calendar, even for home in those like quote unquote, white spaces. We've talked in recent in Minnesota, about our weekends about how we always a lot one weekend day, we're not going to let anything touch our calendar, we're not going anywhere, we're not going to like I'm not entertaining anyone, like nothing is happening. We're at home, doing the things that we want to do, whether that's taking naps or you know, meal prepping for the week, whatever it may be. But I did notice that after we were done working on the book that I were because I was more aware of it, I saw that I could rearrange my calendar even more so to maximize whitespace to create more whitespace in the schedule that I was already working by just shuffling around what days I work and what days I don't work and not even again, not even that whitespace equals not working because that's not The case, it's just that I'm working on whatever I need to work on because I need to not because someone else is dictating it.

Kathleen Shannon 10:07
So, yeah, that for me, that's a big part of it is that whitespace means literally no meetings. Yeah, not even internal meetings, like there are no meetings. And so if I need to write all day, that's what I can do. If I need to bust out a marketing plan, that's what I can do. If I need to design my Instagram feed for the month, that's what I can do. Or if I want to lay out, which is kind of what I've been doing with my whitespace. Lately, I'll lay out and soak up some sun,

Emily Thompson 10:34
right? Same meetings, for sure, kill me, as it kills my productivity, in that if I have one meeting, I'm not getting back in the flow of working for at least another hour. And if I have one meeting, and then an hour later, I have another meeting. And then that's like four hours of my day that are completely gone for two meetings. So I agree with that. I think that I think that meeting, or at least we found that for our productivity meetings are not the most helpful way for us to stay in the doing phase, like I'm probably having meetings and have other people go do their things. But that means I'm tapped out for a minute. So. So recognizing those things, and how it is that we work has been really helpful for allowing us to, one understand how important white space is to the creative brain. But also allow us to recognize where we can super effectively work white space and our schedule, so that we're giving ourselves tons of time to have our meetings and do the work. But lots of sort of, quote unquote, downtime to work on the creative projects we want to work on, or completely let our brain rest and turn off the business for a moment so that we can turn it back on when we need to.

Kathleen Shannon 11:51
I'm actually curious, Caitlin to hear from you. And when it comes to whitespace, because all of a sudden feeling very privileged in the fact that I'm like, I need to take three days off a week to write a book or to lay out or whatever I want to do. I'm not always laying out. But I'm Caitlin, you, obviously you work for us. You have your own business, you do some work for me over at braid creative. So you are reacting to a lot of other people's schedules. How does whitespace work for you.

Caitlin Brehm 12:24
So this is one of the things that I'm horrible at, for myself. But I think the key is, you know, when you do have to be reactive when you work for other people, or just even in your own business, that you're building yourself, you have to be more reactive and can't really necessarily set aside an entire day, it's still worth it to work up from small amounts. So actually, I really loved jenny brown wrote a blog post for us recently on being boss club. And she is a self proclaimed type a creative. So she has a hard time giving herself even as her own boss, these white space breaks too. So she was working with a life coach who just said, you know, give yourself 15 minutes in the morning. Like you can do whatever you want in those 15 minutes. Even if it's just sitting meditating, it might be just responding to emails that are kind of just overwhelming your brain. So that was really great advice. And I try and do that first thing when I wake up to just give myself the white space to sit with my cup of coffee, and it might just honestly be sitting and zoning out and letting myself slowly wake up, it might be answering emails, if I feel really agitated, like that's something I need to do right away. But even that small amount of time is really nice and really can be really impactful.

Emily Thompson 13:57
I love that you say that there are two things that I want to like follow up on there. One is this idea of being reactive and how I feel like whitespace for me is what I whenever I can turn off the need for any potential like reason for me to be reactive, like a lot of times my whitespace is when I'm turning off slack and my email, like I don't want anyone in my bubble whatsoever because I have things to do whatever that may be. So that's time when I am completely cutting off contact with anyone who could affect my no Xin moments or whatever it may mean, I think that's really important to consider with whitespace is really not letting anything touch that space. So that you can do whatever it is that you want to do. And I also think that whitespace is like a marker of leveling up like whenever you can understand the importance and actually do it is when you like reach that next level of bossiness. So if you are staying in reactive mode consistently and you have no whitespace on your calendar You're either going to stay there forever, or you're going to level up and make time for it. Hold on, there was another thought

Kathleen Shannon 15:08
I've got one that I can jump in with it just is that. I think that also whenever you're working for people who value whitespace, obviously on the days that we have whitespace, you might get some stuff, but you're gonna have quiet moments for us to like because we're not workaholics, you would think it'd be the opposite like because we're not workaholics, you have to work extra hard, which is sometimes how it does work with having employees. And that's like the really great thing about having someone working for you. But I think that the opposite is true. And that's what I found in my businesses, correct me if I'm wrong, Caitlin, but I have found that whenever I'm on vacation, things might get quieter for everybody, and that everyone can enjoy that white space a little bit more. And same with like Emily, Emily having self imposed whitespace on Thursdays, like that is actually what gave me then white space on Thursdays as well.

Caitlin Brehm 16:06
It all comes down to having the systems in order to give yourself that white space. So you know, like, when you have to get things done, and when can you can afford a little time and then communicating with like, if I told you guys, hey, I need to like Happy Tuesday for some whitespace. It depends on who you're working with you. It's all about communication. And you might not be able to get that from a nine to five, but even in a nine to five you have maybe that hour lunch break that is built in to be your whitespace. And you fill it with food usually. But yeah, you can you have to think of what you can work with and how you can communicate to the people around you who might try to take that time otherwise.

Emily Thompson 16:49
Yeah, and I also wanted to say that whitespace doesn't have to get love that you just said lunchtime. wife's whitespace does not have to be a whole day like quite often my whitespace is actually half a day, or I'll come in, I'll check in with my team. I'll answer the emails. I'll go through my Asana and you know, respond to any comments. I'll do the work for half a day. Well, no, I'm always doing the work, but I'll do the work for half a day. And then then I'm shutting off slack and turning off Skype and closing my email, and spending three hours at the end of the day, enjoying my whitespace or whatever it may be. It doesn't have to be an entire day, it can be an hour here and half day there, or whatever it may be. I just think that I know that working that into my schedule has definitely made me more productive and the time that I set aside to be productive and more at ease with not being productive when I don't have to be.

Kathleen Shannon 17:44
Hey, boss want even more actionable guidance from me and Emily, we're taking our expertise in branding, marketing and building profitable businesses to the being boss clubhouse. The clubhouse kicks off with a two day online retreat followed by a year of support and community. We've helped our clubhouse members get focused double their revenue, launch their dream offering and market themselves like a boss. Learn more at www.beingboss.club/clubhouse. Again, that's www.beingboss.club/clubhouse.

Emily Thompson 18:18
Did you like this minisode Be sure to check us out on our website at beingboss.club, where you can find more from being boss including our full episodes minisodes and blog posts. And while you're there, be sure to sign up for our mailing list so that you can get access to behind the scenes and exclusive content from Kathleen and myself to help you be more boss in your work and life. Do the work be boss