Airing out the Room

I need a crowbar. Or at least some other kind of heavy, iron tool that I can wield powerfully in my hands.

That’s what it will take—according to a coach friend of mine—to open space my calendar.

What?

It’s not normal to have back-to-back Zoom meetings from 8 AM to 7 PM straight?

The challenge with this kind of relentless schedule is you can’t eat. Or go to the bathroom. And worse, if you are a consultant or coach, you can’t ever turn off your camera to have a snack. It's generally frowned upon if you are facilitating the meeting to not be present when it starts.

Therefore, starting in 2022, I made a promise to myself. Not a resolution—but a promise. I will build empty time into my calendar.

I opened up Outlook, and plugged in a mid-day break as many days as I could throughout January, February, and March.

These meetings are just with me.

I will admit, I have tried this before. I have tried doing this over the years, and naming that time Break or Lunch. But at this point in my life and on the planet, I want to breathe more room into my schedule. So, this time, I called them Air.

Air! How nice to have Air in the middle of a work day!

But what we all know about Air is that it is easy to fill with something else. And it can be sucked out of a room in a moment's time.

Fortunately, a brilliant coach friend gave me an even better idea (thanks, Allie!). She told me that she calls this time Recess.

Recess!

Just the thought of it makes me smile. It sounds so fun!

Plus, Recess is part of the daily schedule. It’s not something you can change. Superintendents don't let you. Even if the weather is poor, kids can strap on waterproof boots and parkas and go out to brave the elements.

And who would ever give up Recess for a Meeting?

So, I have gleefully gone through my calendar and changed all those Airs to now be Recess. And to further emphasize this dramatic move, I colored them all purple so they would look even more fun. So they would stand out. So they would be impenetrable.

Scholastic once published an article that was titled, “Recess Makes Kids Smarter.” In it, a Georgia State researcher said, "With recess, children have choices and can organize their own games, figure out what's fair, and learn a lot of social behavior that they don't learn in P.E."

Positive reinforcement that we have choices is also very useful. We can all use time to organize our own games. And goodness knows, I don’t know about you, but I can learn some new social behavior. The current environment is calling that forward.

This weekend, some teenagers kept poking their heads onto a tennis court where we were playing, yelling something, and then shutting the door. The same kids were later being boisterous in the walkway on the other side of the tennis curtain. I finally lost it. I went out and yelled at them, “Knock it off! You’re being disrespectful! There are tennis matches going on in here!”

They all just stood there with me, masked and holding basketballs, gangly and uncomfortable. They were shocked. And they scurried.

Only later did it hit me that yelling was not that respectful either.

Ugh.

They were having their own recess.

It was a Saturday. They were out of a crazy, almost-death-trap time in school, and they were having unstructured and fun time with their friends.

And even though they were being silly teenagers, their time together was making them smarter.

It’s apparent I need a few more recesses in my days to make me smarter too. Maybe I need to build some in on the weekends. The good news is, I am starting somewhere. Let me know if you want to join me on the monkey bars sometime.