When I was in college, I had this one professor who always allowed us to use a cheat sheet on test days. That policy, in and of itself, was not that unusual, as many professors had similar policies. But where this professor differed was that he had no rules about our cheat sheet other than it all had to fit on the front side of one sheet of paper.
No rules about font size.
No rules about margins.
Simply, "However many words you can get on the front side of one piece of paper."
Like everyone else, I tried to type my entire study sheet on that piece of paper. Every. Single. Word. I used size 6 font and set the margins as wide as I could. And in whatever white space was left by my printer's inability to print that wide, I wrote by hand. There was not one square inch of white space. No discernible margin.
I noticed, though, that this didn't actually help me on test days. There was too much on the page to be useful at all. I couldn't find any of the information I needed because the words were all just crammed together on the page.
So I changed my strategy and actually studied for the test. Then I put information on the sheet that I thought I might need during the test. Around each piece of this information was space. Lots and lots of space. And because I had created margins around my information, it was easy to find what I was looking for.
I was thinking about this yesterday because I listened to a sermon from Andy Stanley called Breathing Room, and it made me realize that sometimes too much is just too much. Cramming everything into life that you think you need doesn't make your life better, it makes it busy. And it makes it infinitely harder to find the things in your life that are actually beneficial.
All that to say, I'm going to begin today to find the margins of my life, create some white space, and enjoy the breathing room.
That will be nice and I hope enjoyable for you.
ReplyDeleteMike