On April 11th, 2023, we launched the Trilith Foundation Enrichment Series!

Designed to create space to gather in community and learn about the elements that help us flourish, the Enrichment Series features speakers, leaders, and experts in their fields who will guide us toward living better lives, one step at a time. Our hope is that the Enrichment Series will not only educate those who attend, but that it will enrich their lives in new ways as well.

We were thrilled to welcome Juliet Funt to lead a conversation on Mental Margin. Featured in top media outlets such as Forbes, CNBC, Fast Company, and NPR, Juliet is a globally renowned keynote speaker, tough-love advisor to the Fortune 500, and founder and CEO of the efficiency training firm, Juliet Funt Group. In her work, she’s been an evangelist for freeing the potential of companies by unburdening their talent from busywork, a powerful concept she’s brought to brands like Spotify, National Geographic, Anthem, Vans, Abbott, Costco, Pepsi, Nike, Wells Fargo, Sephora, Sysco, and ESPN. She’s also the author of A Minute to Think, a work devoted to helping readers reclaim their creativity, conquer their busyness, and do their best work as a result of the mental margin they find in doing both.

As Juliet led our first gathering in our Enrichment Series on Mental Margin, she pointed us to the one professional problem we all have in common: we are not infinite, but the work is. There will always be more to do. We are buried in work and overwhelmed, and many find themselves trying to grind harder. This is the age of overload we find ourselves in.

But there is a solution!

Look at your day and find the white space.

White space is the part of your day that is unburdened. It’s the margin where you are able to think, ideate, and play. Your greatest ideas and most productive work come from the white space of time where you have a minute to think. 

But how do we create more white space in our schedules?

A practical way to gain more white space is to create what Juliet calls “the wedge”: to insert time in between activities that were previously connected. Time in between meetings, in between a question and a response. Adding time in between these activities creates a little oxygenation. This time doesn’t have to be long. These small interstitials of two minutes, five minutes, or 30 minutes can change the metronome of your day.

Juliet and her team’s research shows that American companies waste $1million annually on wasteful work for every 50 employees. Juliet walked us through four common thieves of our time. These thieves disguise themselves as assets but are actually risks to our time. They morph and steal our focus.

The thieves of time are: 

Drive - risks turning into Overdrive.



Excellence - risks turning into Perfectionism.

Activity - risks turning into Frenzy.

The way to stop these thieves of time is to ask yourself these simplification questions:

• Is there anything I can let go of?
• Where is “good enough,” good enough?
• What do I truly need to know?
• What deserves my attention? 

Lastly, Juliet helped us define high-value work versus low-value work.

The four R’s of High-Value Work are:

Revenue, Reputation, Reward, and Readiness.

The four P’s of Low-Value Work are:

Panicking, Pandering, Procedure, and Padding.

Juliet showed us how taking a minute to think can change the nature of work, guiding us to find the missing element of white space—short periods of open, unscheduled time that, when recaptured, change the very nature of our work and our lives.

After reading this, we urge you to find the white space in your own lives. Create “the wedges” in your schedule and give yourselves the time to think, ideate, play, and create something new. And learn more by reading Juliet’s book – A Minute to Think. You can read the first chapter of the book here.

If you'd like to know which of the Thieves is your biggest obstacle and how to overcome it, you may want to take Thieves of Time Assessment – a survey designed by the Juliet Funt Group to help individuals identify the root causes of workplace overload and reclaim their time. Take the assessment here.  Juliet would love to hear from you and can be reached at juliet@julietfunt.com.

Join us on June 13th from 8:00-9:30am with Jenn Boughey for our next Trilith Enrichment Series event for a chance to listen, learn, and build community with others in the creative community.

To register for this session of the Enrichment Series, as well as all Trilith Foundation events, click here.