The Unexpected Power of Recording What You Do Every Day
I may not have been much of a sportsman, but I have always been someone who exercised.
I could, at best, be described as a nerd. I never played sports with any particular regularity or success. I don’t know which was the cause and which was the effect! But that never came in the way of my exercising regularly.
During my school days, it was the humble Surya Namaskar and squats, done at home. In undergraduate college, we had what passed for a gymnasium: a few essential pieces of equipment, a bunch of mirrors and, right in front of the hostel, a set of parallel bars (such installations were fairly common in those days, but are sadly missing nowadays). Dynamic, swinging pull-ups on those bars became my routine. They were quite an awe-inspiring sight for passers-by! Those workouts certainly helped me work up an appetite—and make peace with whatever the hostel mess happened to serve!
At my first job, I joined a karate class. It was run by a tall gentleman from North India who looked quite different from the local population of the small town where I was working as a lecturer at a newly established engineering college.
I am not sure whether postgraduate studies drew me more towards IIT Bombay or its swimming pool! Whatever the reason, after securing a good GATE score, I joined IIT Bombay and lost no time getting into the pool. Those one-and-a-half years were filled with daily swimming, occasional gym sessions and evening jogs along the maintenance road running beside the Powai water pipelines, often bathed in the golden evening sunlight.
After leaving college, I settled into a pattern of swimming during the summer and going to the gym during the rest of the year. This continued for many years.
At different stages, I thought I should stop going to the gym for various reasons and switch to a “maintenance” routine, perhaps through yoga. Eventually, I realised that a gym isn’t just for the young. In fact, maintaining muscle strength becomes even more important as we grow older.
My latest return to regular strength training came on 15 July this year. I decided to set up a modest home gym, with just a small collection of dumbbells and resistance bands. Nothing elaborate. Just enough to get going.
So, where is the productivity angle?
Well, if you are still looking for the thread about being organised, personal productivity or time management, it’s coming!
If you have been following my newsletter, you must have heard me talk about the importance of journaling for productivity several times.
I am not referring to the conventional Dear Diary kind of journal, where we pour out our thoughts and feelings at the end of the day. I am talking about a productivity journal.
The idea is simple. Maintain a concise record of what you accomplished each day across different performance areas of your life — work, household responsibilities, health, hobbies, and so on.
These are not elaborate accounts of the day. Just a few crisp notes, recorded consistently and without missing a day. Each area has its own dedicated space, so the entries remain organised and easy to retrieve. It takes hardly five minutes, spread across the day, to maintain this record.
I also maintain a simple running counter for repetitive activities. For instance, an entry might read #Swimming 2026 #21 (700m), #Tekdi #22 or #Strength #64. These little counters tell me how many times I have engaged in a particular activity. Even without elaborate reports or visualisations, they provide a simple indication of how consistently I have been pursuing an activity and how a habit is gradually taking shape. There is something satisfying about seeing those numbers climb!
There is something I particularly like about this practice. It is, in a way, a pat on your own back. The idea is to record the things you feel good about having accomplished. Not necessarily spectacular achievements, but the little things that matter to you. You exercised, made progress on a project, learnt something new, attended to a household responsibility, read a few pages of a book, or spent time pursuing a hobby. A few words are enough.
Recording these accomplishments is a way of acknowledging your own efforts. When you do this consistently, you reinforce the behaviours you want to continue. Over time, the practice itself helps turn these activities into enduring habits.
There is also a bigger picture to discover. When you look at the record of a particular day, you get a sense of how productive you were and how varied your activities were. Did you make progress on different fronts? Did you use your available energy for the tasks that were appropriate to it? A good day need not be one spent entirely at work. It can be one in which you made meaningful use of your time and energy across several dimensions of life.
And when you look at any one of these areas over a longer period, you begin to see something even more valuable: consistency. You can see whether you have been showing up regularly and appreciate how small, repeated efforts can compound into something substantial.
There is another very practical benefit. These daily records make preparing weekly and monthly reviews almost effortless. Instead of trying to recall what you did over the past week or month, you simply go through your journal. You have the evidence right there!
You can review what you accomplished, what received less attention than it deserved, and whether you made progress on the fronts that matter to you. The weekly review helps you stay on course, while the monthly review gives you a somewhat broader perspective.
And these records have a value beyond routine reviews. They can be revisited and analysed much later, sometimes in ways you hadn’t imagined when you first made those entries. This is one reason I place so much importance on maintaining a productivity journal.
An interesting experiment with my journal
I have created some wonderful reports from my journal for different audiences, including myself! I will share some of those experiences in due course. But today, let me talk about one particular experiment related to my physical workouts.
As I mentioned earlier, I returned to strength training in mid-July this year after a brief hiatus, this time with a stronger conviction that strength training is something one should never really give up. The intensity, of course, can always be adjusted to suit one’s capacity. I was curious to see how I had been doing, so I decided to take a closer look at my exercise record.
What makes this experiment even more interesting is how modern-day AI has made creating visually appealing reports almost child’s play. You no longer need to be a data analyst or spend hours preparing charts and visualisations in a spreadsheet. I hope this opens up yet another reason to take journaling seriously!
I picked a period of a little over three months, from 15 July to 31 October 2026, and gave ChatGPT a raw dump of my daily journal entries.
I asked it to identify and classify six different kinds of physical activity:
– Strength training: Entries explicitly marked #Strength.
– Stretching: Entries explicitly marked #Stretch.
– Brisk walking: Days on which I recorded 5,000 or more #steps. I deliberately excluded days with 3,000 or 4,000 steps.
– Swimming: Entries explicitly mentioning #swimming.
– Hill: Entries mentioning #Tekdi climbing.
– Table Tennis: Entries indicating that I had played #TT.
I then asked ChatGPT to create a calendar showing these activities day by day, using a different colour for each.
The colour scheme was simple: dark pink for strength training, light pink for stretching, grey for brisk walking, blue for swimming, bright green for Tekdi and purple for table tennis. A day with multiple activities would have multiple horizontal colour bands. And there it was!
What had been scattered across months of chronological journal entries was now presented in a single visual calendar. I could see the different activities together, day by day, without having to browse through individual entries.
I hadn’t maintained an exercise database. I had simply maintained a journal.
Think about it. When you record something today, you may not have a particular reason to analyse it later. You are simply maintaining a record of what you did. They become a historical record that you can revisit, examine and learn from.
You could look at how regularly you pursued a hobby, how much attention you gave to your health, how your reading habits evolved or how consistently you worked towards a particular goal. You may discover patterns that you hadn’t noticed while living through those days.
And perhaps the most satisfying benefit of all:
When I see such a proud record of my efforts, I would think twice before giving up any of these routines!
My exercise-calendar experiment is just one example of what is possible. I could have spent hours going through months of journal entries, counting activities and preparing a calendar manually. Instead, I got ChatGPT to do the extraction and create a visual representation of the information. What I found particularly interesting was how easily I could go back and forth, refine the presentation and arrive at something that was both useful and visually appealing.
This is perhaps one of the most exciting possibilities that AI brings to journaling. It makes the information we have painstakingly accumulated over time much more accessible and easier to analyse. And I hope that the prospect of turning everyday notes into such interesting reports will encourage more people to take up journaling.
Of course, none of this is possible without the underlying habit. AI cannot extract meaningful insights from records that were never maintained in the first place.
So, if you haven’t already developed the habit, perhaps it’s time to start journaling. Don’t worry about writing elaborate accounts of your day. A few sharp notes, recorded consistently and organised well, can go a long way. Don’t forget, without a strong reminder, even the best intentions can fade away. Set a daily reminder and make journaling a part of your routine. Before long, it should become second nature.
Record your accomplishments today. Appreciate your consistency tomorrow. Discover the value of both when you look back over time.
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What Should Go on Your To-Do List?
Do you write down “Have breakfast” on your To-Do List? What about lunch, dinner, or your evening cup of tea? Probably not. These are part of your daily routine. You don’t need reminders for things you do automatically. But what about the other things you need to do? Should all of them go on your To-Do List? Let’s find out.
I’d like to look at our tasks from this perspective and divide them into three categories.
1. Things that are already part of your routine
You brush your teeth, have your meals, and perhaps go for your evening walk. You don’t need to record these activities if you do them automatically.
But suppose you’ve recently decided to exercise every morning or practise singing every evening. Until these activities become habitual, a reminder might help.
2. Things that must happen at a particular time
A dentist’s appointment, a meeting with a colleague, or a deadline for submitting a report needs your attention at a specific time or by a particular date.
Your calendar is the right place for such commitments. You can also set reminders for recurring activities, such as watering your plants every Sunday.
3. Things you can do at any time
You need to buy a book, reply to an email, research a holiday destination, fix a computer problem, or prepare an article for publication.
These are tasks you intend to do but can complete whenever you have the time and opportunity. They belong on your To-Do List.
The principle is simple: don’t record routine activities unnecessarily, put time-specific commitments on your calendar, and capture the remaining tasks on your To-Do List.
“Wait! Wait! You’re going too far! First, I’m not even sure I need a To-Do List!”
Ah! I hear you.
Perhaps you’ve tried maintaining one and found it cumbersome. Maybe your list grew so long that you stopped looking at it. In fact, I’ve written about the common problems people face with To-Do Lists and how to overcome them.
But let’s not confuse the difficulties of maintaining a To-Do List with the need to keep track of our commitments. You may use a notebook, an app, or another system. What matters is having a reliable place to record the things you intend to do.
Every day, newer tasks and responsibilities compete for our attention. Someone asks us to do something, we notice a problem that needs fixing, or we think of an idea worth pursuing. Meanwhile, earlier commitments gradually recede into the background—not because they are unimportant, but because something newer has occupied our attention.
Our biggest problem is often not the work itself but remembering all the tasks that we are committed to.
Think about the tasks that get done because someone keeps reminding you. A colleague follows up, a client asks for an update, or a family member nudges you. The task stays on your radar, and eventually you act on it. But what about the tasks nobody chases you about? You may want to learn a new skill, exercise regularly, write a book, or pursue a personal project. These may be extremely important to you, yet nobody is going to keep reminding you.
Sometimes, people trust you to deliver and don’t follow up. Sometimes, they forget. And sometimes, the task matters only to you. These are precisely the tasks that risk slipping through the cracks.
A To-Do List is non-negotiable if you want to keep track of your commitments. It acts as an external memory, protecting your intentions from being crowded out by newer demands.
Of course, adding a task to your list doesn’t get it done automatically. You still have to roll up your sleeves and do the work. That’s why you need another habit: before deciding what to work on next, consult your To-Do List. It helps you choose from all your outstanding commitments rather than acting only on whatever happens to be on your mind.
A list won’t do the work for you. But it will help ensure that the work you intend to do doesn’t get forgotten.
When Your Goals Get in Each Other’s Way
All of us who live in large residential societies know that WhatsApp group where the messages never seem to stop.
Someone has parked in somebody else’s parking spot. Someone has brought a ferocious-looking dog into the smaller passenger lift. A group of children has damaged the common lawn. Someone is complaining about the security guards. Someone else is asking whether the water supply has been restored.
And then there are the less contentious messages. Someone has brought mangoes from their farm and is taking orders. Someone is selling homemade pickles. Someone announces that they are taking orders for chilli chicken.
We can’t really ignore the group. After all, these are our neighbours.
One day, amidst this endless stream of messages, I noticed a curious advertisement for singing classes in our society. I casually mentioned it to my wife and moved on. She didn’t and said, “Why don’t you join? You love singing. You love songs.”
My immediate response was simple: “I can’t. My hands are already full.”
I was already pursuing several things. I didn’t want to become one of those people who spreads themselves too thin by taking on one more interest, one more project, one more goal.
Then, almost as an afterthought, I said, “Wait. I think I could do it.”
What made me change my mind? It wasn’t that I suddenly discovered I had more time. It wasn’t that I had decided to abandon the other things I was doing. Something else had occurred to me.
But to explain that, I need to go back a little.
We often talk about productivity as if the problem is simply a shortage of time. There is always something else we want to do. So we look for ways to squeeze more out of the day. We try to become more efficient. All of that can help. But there is a point beyond which productivity techniques cannot solve the problem. At that point, perhaps the problem isn’t how we use our time, but what we are trying to accomplish with that time.
The idea that we cannot pursue everything at once is hardly new. In Essentialism, Greg McKeown makes the point vividly by describing the futility of making “just a millimetre of progress in a million directions.” The essentialist approach is to make deliberate choices about what is truly important and focus our efforts accordingly.
I have seen a tendency in many people I work with. I sometimes describe them as Octopus personas. Like an octopus with its many arms reaching in different directions, they have numerous goals, projects and ambitions competing for their attention. They aren’t necessarily lazy or disorganized. Quite often, they are energetic, capable people who are genuinely interested in many things. The problem is that their ambitions exceed their available resources.
One useful way of making this visible is time budgeting. When we actually allocate the available hours to our various goals, the arithmetic can be revealing. There simply isn’t enough time to make meaningful progress on everything.
The general lesson, therefore, is fairly straightforward:
We should have a small number of carefully selected goals that we are genuinely prepared to pursue.
But there is another question that is less often discussed. Even after we have reduced our goals to a manageable number, are those goals compatible with one another? That is the question I want to explore here.
Having multiple goals isn’t necessarily a problem. In fact, some goals can reinforce each other.
The reason I eventually said yes was that singing wasn’t really going to be one more thing on my already crowded list. It connected with something I was already trying to accomplish.
As a productivity coach, I have always wanted to improve my speaking voice. Speaking is central to my work—whether in coaching sessions, presentations, workshops, or simply communicating ideas. In my search for ways to develop my voice, I came across Voice and the Actor. Interestingly, the book suggested that learning to sing could be an effective way to develop the voice.
Suddenly, singing didn’t look like another goal competing for my time. It looked like a way of pursuing two goals together.
So an attempt to become a better speaker eventually led me to take up singing—bringing two seemingly different goals together. That’s a very different situation from having two goals that pull us in opposite directions.
Imagine training to be a sumo wrestler and a race jockey. There is nothing inherently wrong with either goal. But the physical characteristics and training requirements that help you progress toward one may work against what you need for the other. No amount of time management completely eliminates that conflict. Of course, this is an exaggerated example. But real life contains much subtler versions of the same problem.
We may want to:
- build a demanding business while pursuing several equally demanding side projects;
- become an expert in one field while simultaneously trying to master another;
- maximize income while deliberately reducing the amount of time we spend working;
- write a book while taking on several other major creative commitments.
Each goal may make perfect sense on its own. The difficulty appears when we put them together.
It helps to think about goals in three broad categories.
1. Complementary goals
These goals help each other.
My singing and speaking goals are an example. The time and effort I put into developing my voice can contribute to both objectives.
When goals are complementary, pursuing one can help you make progress toward another. This is a wonderful form of leverage.
2. Independent goals
Some goals don’t help each other, but they don’t interfere with each other either.
You might want to learn photography and improve your swimming. Neither has much to do with the other, but there is no fundamental contradiction between them.
If you have enough time and energy, you can pursue both.
3. Conflicting goals
Then there are goals where progress toward one can make the other more difficult.
This is where we need to be careful.
The conflict doesn’t necessarily mean that one of the goals is bad. It means that pursuing both simultaneously may have a cost that we haven’t accounted for. And that cost may show up as time, energy, money, attention—or simply the inability to make meaningful progress on either.
Thus, before adding another significant goal, it is worth asking a few questions:
- Does this goal support something else I am already trying to achieve?
- If it doesn’t, is it at least neutral?
- Does pursuing it consume resources that another important goal needs?
- Are two goals demanding fundamentally different things from me?
Sometimes we discover that two goals can coexist beautifully. And sometimes we discover that we are trying to train for the productivity equivalent of being both a sumo wrestler and a race jockey.
And we need to take a step back.
Because productivity isn’t only about doing more with the time we have. Sometimes it is about choosing goals that allow our efforts to work together rather than against each other.
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Is Organizing Your Home Really That Different?
As a productivity coach for knowledge workers, I spend a lot of time talking about being organized at work. And when I say “organized,” I usually mean organizing our digital world.
- A task.
- A document.
- A bookmark.
- A checklist.
- An email.
- A note.
Most of what we work with today exists somewhere on a screen.
Very recently, one of my clients asked me a question:
“You have given us some wonderful ideas on how to organize our digital world. Do you also have any tips on organizing the physical world?”
I said, “No. Not because I think physical organization is unimportant. I simply don’t venture into that area. There are professional organizers who specialize in organizing homes and physical spaces, and they certainly know much more about it than I do.”
I also assured him that the underlying philosophy isn’t very different, and suggested he check out my blog post on the topic
I had actually thought about this quite some time ago. I had always wondered how similar the two would be in practice. And at some point, I picked up The Home Edit by Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin.
As I went through it, I found something both pleasing and, at the same time, not particularly shocking.
Professional organizers think about organization in much the same way I do.
In fact, when you think about it, it would make sense that physical organization came first. Many of the principles we now apply to digital information are probably descendants of principles developed for organizing physical things.
Here are some of the similarities I noticed.
1. Organization is about making things functional
The objective isn’t simply to make a space look tidy. It is to create a space that is clutter-free and functional.
The same is true of a digital system.
A beautifully arranged folder structure that makes it difficult to find anything isn’t an organized system. Organization should make things easier to use. We should have a unique, planned place for everything we deal with in our work.
2. Organization saves time
This one is obvious once you experience it. If you know exactly where something is, you don’t have to search for it. And if you have a designated place for something, putting it away becomes almost automatic.
The same principle applies to digital information. Put things in their right places at the first opportunity, and they become much easier to find when you need them.
3. Good organization takes some work
Organizing isn’t easy. It takes time. But once you have a good system in place, maintaining it becomes much easier, although not easy. That’s true whether you’re organizing a kitchen drawer or your digital files. The initial investment can save you a lot of effort later.
Once you experience the tangible and intangible benefits of being organized, you become more willing to pay the small price of maintaining the system. You save time not because you work faster, but because you spend less time looking for things.
4. Organization gives you a sense of calm
Clutter creates a certain amount of background noise. When things are lying around without a place, your brain keeps getting little reminders that something needs attention. When clutter is minimized and systems are in place, things feel different. You feel more grounded.
You know where things are. You know what needs to be done. And perhaps most importantly, you don’t have to keep everything in your head. That is true of both physical and digital organization.
Physical organization is part of work management too
There is one more way I look at this. If you have a system for managing your work, organizing things is actually a subset of the overall system. Work management doesn’t begin with organization. Before you organize something, there is usually a preprocessing phase.
Something comes into your world.
You receive an email.
You have a conversation.
You read something.
Someone gives you a document.
You come up with an idea.
You first need to process that stuff and, where necessary, turn it into tasks, reference material, checklists or other artifacts. Then comes organization. And after organization comes the other side of the system:
When and how will you access it?
You organize a document so that you can find and use it later. You organize a task so that you can see it when you are ready to work on it. You organize reference material so that it is available when you need it. So organization isn’t the end goal. It is the bridge between processing something and using it effectively.
There is one thing physical organization has that digital organization doesn’t quite have
And that is aesthetics. A physical space has to work, but most of us also want it to look good. A well-organized kitchen, bookshelf or desk can give you pleasure simply because it looks inviting. Digital organization has aesthetics too, of course.
We care about how our desktop looks. We choose attractive apps. We arrange things neatly. But the definition of beauty is somewhat different. But aesthetics play a much smaller role in digital organization. The stakes simply aren’t as high.
And what about the physical things in our work?
Even in a predominantly digital work-management system, we still have physical things:
- Books.
- Notebooks.
- Pens.
- Paper documents.
- Equipment.
- Cables.
Things we need to keep for a project. The simplest principle I can think of for organizing these is: Don’t rely on your memory.
Give things a planned place. When you get the opportunity, put things back in that place. And if a physical space is difficult to access or contains many things, make a note of what is where. You could even take a photograph. A photograph of the contents of a storage box may save you from opening the box six months later just to remember what you put inside it.
If you’d like to go deeper into the idea of planned spaces, you can read my detailed post, You Don’t Need More Storage. You Need Planned Spaces.
Don’t make your brain remember where things are. Make the system remember for you.
Whether the “system” is a folder on your computer, a task manager, a bookshelf, a kitchen drawer or a storage box, the underlying philosophy remains remarkably similar.
Different things. Different tools. Different spaces.
But much the same idea:
Give everything a place, and make that place work for you.
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Stop Relying on Your Memory
“I will remember that.”
Those four words have probably created more unnecessary mental load than we realize.
We say them when we put something somewhere “for now,” when someone gives us a piece of information, when we notice that something needs to be done later, or when we tell ourselves that we will remember where we kept something. Sometimes we do. Often, we don’t. And even when we do remember, we may have to spend time searching our memory to retrieve it.
This is why I was struck by a recent post by Seth Godin, the bestselling author and one of the most widely read thinkers on marketing, work and ideas.
In his August 16 post, “Replace the filters,” Seth suggests a simple habit: when something needs replacing, put a recurring reminder in your calendar, record where the spare is kept, and save the link to buy another one. He also suggests writing down things such as the type of paint used in a room, or taking photographs of reorganized shelves and drawers so you can find things later.
His ideas are very much in line with something I have been saying about being organized. Being organized is an antidote to our fragile working memory. At its core, being organized is about retrieval.
Something that matters should be:
- Secured
- In a known place
- In a unique place
- Easy to access
When these conditions are met, you can retrieve what you need when you need it—without searching, guessing or mentally scanning.
The calendar is the simplest example. You expect meetings and events to occur, so you create a dedicated space for them. Events go into the calendar. They don’t live in your memory, scattered messages or random notes.
The same principle applies to many other things in my personal life.
I photograph the contents of my bed-storage compartments. When I need something that is rarely used, I can look at the photograph first instead of opening several compartments to find it.
I maintain a record of important keys. It tells me what each key opens, how many copies exist, and who is holding each copy.
I maintain a “Where is what?” table for the house. It tells me where things are kept. It is particularly useful for things we use sparingly or new things that have recently entered the house—Diwali lights, a CD drive, a rarely used tool, and so on.
I keep my brand colours readily available. For each colour, I have its glyph and hex code. Whenever I create publishing material, I don’t have to remember or look up the colours—I simply retrieve them from this reference.
These are all examples of planned spaces. Sometimes the space is a calendar. Sometimes it is a photograph, a table, a folder or a checklist.
Without a planned space, things get put wherever there happens to be room at the moment—a random note, an open browser tab, an inbox or a folder you won’t remember later. The item hasn’t disappeared. But practically, it is lost because you don’t know where to retrieve it from.
Being organized, therefore is about deciding in advance where things belong and maintaining those spaces so retrieval remains effortless. There is some upfront effort in creating these spaces. But that effort is largely one-time, while the benefits compound: less searching, less resistance to starting, fewer last-minute surprises and greater clarity about what deserves your attention.
So the next time you catch yourself or others around you thinking:
“I’ll remember that.”
Stop.
Don’t remember it. Design a place for it.
With thanks to Seth Godin’s August 16, 2026 post, “Replace the filters,” for the reminder.
Making Room for the Unexpected
When I stand on the balcony of my flat on the 17th floor, with just a metal grill between me and about 150 feet of empty space below, I still feel safe. I wonder, if there were no grill, would I be comfortable standing there? Probably not. The grill doesn’t change where I am standing. I am not using it, yet I can stand there quite comfortably because of the grill.
Similarly, when you walk on the floor, you hardly need any extra space to walk on. But imagine you have only that much space on a ridge; now you get nervous.
The mere presence of the grill or that extra space around us changes how we feel. Let’s call that psychological support a buffer. A buffer doesn’t have to be used to be useful, but its presence gives you comfort and confidence.
Think about getting ready for an important event. If you have plenty of time, you can get ready calmly. You may even enjoy the process. But if you have planned every minute right up to the time you need to leave, you are racing against the clock. You may still reach the event on time. But the journey there has been stressful. You would curse every red signal that is delaying you further, or get irritated even by an innocent comment from your spouse or friend travelling along with you. And if something unexpected happens and you are late, the consequences can be even worse.
Now, this is a no-brainer. Everyone would agree that, yes, one should have a buffer. But here’s the problem. We don’t have infinite capacity. We have a fixed number of hours in a day, and usually more things we want to do than we can comfortably fit into them. So we optimize. This is where the problem gets interesting
Let’s see something I faced today, at the time of writing this. Every Saturday, our group goes for a mini-trek on a nearby hill. The group starts at 7 AM. They don’t wait beyond that; whoever is there starts the trek.
But before I go, I want to do my usual morning chores, do a bit of stretching, have my oats and milk, and then go. So, I get up early on Saturday. Today also, I woke up on time, but as I moved through my chores and breakfast, it was already time to leave and I was yet to have my milk. I would have to skip my morning milk to make it to the starting point at 7. I chose to have my milk, leave a little later, and catch up with the group on the trail. I used my buffer to not miss my milk, as I would like to have good strength before I start. I could do that because I wasn’t asking anyone else to wait for me. And in this particular situation, I considered what I gained worth the small risk and inconvenience.
That’s a trade-off. And I think we make similar trade-offs with our time all the time. We are often confronted with this question: Where can I afford to consume the buffer?
The danger is consuming it everywhere
The problem starts when we treat every bit of unused time as an opportunity to fit something else in. A 30-minute gap appears in the calendar. I can fit a call here. A journey takes 30 minutes. I can leave exactly 30 minutes before the appointment. A meeting is scheduled to end at 11. The next one can start at 11.
Sounds logical!
But now there is no room for reality. The meeting runs five minutes over. Traffic is worse than expected. The task takes longer. And suddenly, you are in the red. We have optimized our time but in turn made the system fragile.
In the familiar story of the tortoise and the hare, the hare thought he had such a big lead that he could afford a nap. He had a buffer. He spent it. The problem wasn’t taking the nap. It was misjudging how much buffer he had. We do the same with time. The trick is knowing how much buffer we can afford to spend.
A buffer is not necessarily wasted time
This is where I think our productivity mindset sometimes misleads us. We tend to look at unused capacity and ask:
“What else can I do with it?”
But before asking that question, we should ask:
“What happens if I need it?”
That unused 15 minutes may never be needed. The meeting may finish on time. The traffic may be light. Nothing unexpected may happen. But the buffer has still served a purpose. It has given you room to absorb variation—and, in turn, the freedom to experience those moments with a relaxed mind.
And there is another way to make a buffer less frustrating. Hedge it!
If I have an important event and want to arrive early, I might carry my headphones and listen to an audiobook if I have to wait. I’m still protecting the buffer. I’m simply giving myself something useful to do if I don’t need it.
Punctuality is good. We should show up at the right time when we are expected to. And having enough buffer makes that much more reliably possible without stress.
But we don’t always have the luxury of keeping a large buffer. Sometimes, the stakes are low enough that consuming some of it is perfectly reasonable. When everything goes as planned, a buffer may look like wasted time. But when something goes wrong, you are glad you had it. And sometimes, if we know there is a good chance we won’t need the buffer, we can hedge it by having something useful or simply enjoyable to do.
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