How Modern Day Living Devours Margins

When we type Word documents, we set margins so the text will fit on the paper and is well centered and easy to read. Even homeowners and property management companies design landscaping or build fences around their properties to define their boundaries - another form of a 'margin.'

Understanding that our physical world is defined by limits raises the question if we should pay more attention to 'margins' in other ways too. Ways that could very well improve our emotional well-being.

According to the statistics mentioned by Rick Warren in his book The Purpose Driven Life, we are overscheduled, overloaded and overstressed. You may be surprised by some of his other statistics:

~ People sleep 2 1/2 fewer hours each night compared to one hundred years ago

~ The average workweek is longer than it was in the 1960s

~ We spend hours each months just looking for things at work

~ We spend eight months of our lives opening junk mail

~ We spend years waiting for people who are chronically late or marginless

However, people who try to do too much and are late all the time are not the only ones who are 'marginless'. The procrastinators are another example. They wait until the last minute to get everything done, which then puts stress on the people who have to work or live with them because they can't live within a margin of time.

Marginless people are easy to spot. Those are the ones who generally speed in traffic, run red lights frequently, and beep their horn if you don't go fast enough to suit them. Chances are while they do this they have cell phones pressed to their ears. They are so far behind on work that they need the time they should be concentrating on driving to make calls instead. Marginless people are also the ones who are chronically late for business and personal appointments alike.

Why do some people have a hard time setting personal margins? There are several different ways to go about forming this habit. One way is to prioritize. In this context prioritizing does not mean scheduling what is most important to others, but by evaluating what is important to us.

One example would be to work the eight hours per day that you have to keep your family supplied with the shelter and comfort they need, but stop and think before you take on that extra project which means you will have to stay late.

Many of us take on these extra projects and extra work because we think it

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