My relationship with time has always been complicated.
One of my first girlfriends used to make fun of me. I had this black leather Mandarina Duck agenda always with me (quite unusual for a student), and to find time to see her, I would open the agenda and pencil her in. A slot. Like a concert or a dentist appointment. To me it was a sign of respect (time with you matters, and when I’m with you and fully focused on us). The way it came across, apparently, was a little different.
Years later, time is still an issue. Too much to do, never enough hours to do it in.
Part of that is my own doing. As you may know, I’m a fan of no-meeting days, detox moments, and Shultz Hours (you don’t know what a Shultz Hour is? I wrote about it here.). I carve empty space into my week on purpose, and I defend it like a guard dog.
But there’s one habit I’ve never mentioned on this blog. The one that actually keeps the whole thing from falling apart. I call them buffer hours.
Here’s the idea. Every single day, my agenda holds fewer working hours than the day technically offers. If a day has eight hours of work in it, I plan for six. If it has six, I plan for four. The missing hours are reserved for the chaos I know is coming.
Because something always explodes, on a personal or a professional level.
A fine that has to be paid today. A two-line email that turns into a forty-minute conversation. A colleague that needs ten minutes that become ninety. You know the script. We all know the script.
For years I planned my days as if none of this would happen. I’d fill every slot, feel like a hero at 9 am, and a wreck by 6 pm, with more than half the list untouched and a knot in my stomach. The problem, I guess, was me. I was planning for a perfect day that never showed up.
So now I plan for the explosion. The buffer hours are just that: rooms set aside in advance for the bomb I know is coming, so that when it goes off I can absorb it instead of being buried by it.
I learned this the hard way. After enough years of watching a carefully packed calendar fall apart by mid-afternoon, I stopped treating the chaos as the exception. It’s the rule. Ninety-nine percent of the time, my agenda explodes. The buffer assumes it will. The one percent where it doesn’t is pure upside.
There’s something almost paradoxical here. By planning to do less, you get more done. The reason? Well, we live in a frictionless world. A plan that ignores reality is sounds more like a wish than a plan.
A few things I’ve learned about buffer hours:
- They have to be invisible to other people. The moment someone spots a free slot, it gets filled. As far as my calendar is concerned, those hours are already booked.
- They are not break time. A buffer hour isn’t a Shultz Hour or a coffee. It’s structural slack, like the gap an engineer leaves in a bridge so the steel can move without cracking.
- The bigger the role, the bigger the buffer. The more people depend on you, the more your day gets hijacked by things you didn’t choose.
I won’t pretend I’ve mastered this. Some weeks the buffer isn’t big enough and the explosion wins anyway. But most days, the gap between what I planned and what actually happened stays small enough to survive. And for someone with my relationship to time, that’s something close to peace.
It works.
Try it. Plan for less. Leave room for the bomb.
You’ll thank me when it goes off.
