Gardening and Time Management

I finally made some time today to address the growing population of weeds in my vegetable garden. While I sat pulling blades of grass and miniature maple trees from amid the squash, tomato, and snow pea plants, I thought back to earlier in the year when I'd first planted my garden.

I'm new at this gardening thing and as little green seedlings began to emerge from the carefully cultivated soil, I was overtaken by a sense of pride and fear all at once. Proud that I'd been able to create life (so to speak) and fearful that I had no idea if the emerging seedlings were the ones I'd planted or if they were weeds! They were so small - how could I tell? So I just watered them all and they all grew. "What a fine gardener I am!" I told myself. As the days went by, however, it became clear that either I'd planted way too much (a story for another day - think summer squash plants!) or half of what I was carefully cultivating was, in fact, weeds. Now what?

So what does my garden have to do with time management? Our schedules and To Do lists can quickly become overrun with "weeds" if we don't take time each day to review what's there and weed out the unnecessary tasks and obligations. Just as with my garden (where it was hard to tell the weeds from the veggie plants) it can be challenging to determine which of our daily tasks are important and deserving of our time and attention, and which are weeds and need to be plucked out before they take over the whole day.

My suggestion: Take a look at your schedule/calendar/day planner. Is your day overrun with "weeds"? If so, begin to weed them out, making more space for the delicate plants in your life to grow and flourish. At the same time, be mindful of new "seeds" that try to plant themselves in your schedule. If they're not really important, don't let them in your garden. You'll end up devoting time to nurturing weeds, time better spent on the plants in your life.