Leave a Little Space

I’ve just spent a week in Perth, Western Australia. My trip was partly to catch up with family, and partly to connect with old business contacts. I’m planning to spend more time in WA over the coming years, and this was the first of a few trips I’m making this year to do some good work there.

In the eight days I was there, I planned just two days of business meetings. That’s all. You could argue that, given my goals, it wasn’t a very good use of my time, right? Surely I could have maximised my time by booking more meetings over more days so I could generate more opportunities.

The younger version of me would have definitely done that.

The wiser version of me planned it differently. I deliberately left plenty of blank space. Partly to breath out between meetings, partly to chill, and partly so I could act quickly on unexpected opportunities that inevitably would come up. Which they did.

During one of my meetings, the person I was meeting with said “have you met up with Jane yet?” Jane was an obvious person for me to connect with, yet she wasn’t in my list of people I’d planned to meet this time around. So I got hold of her, and we had breakfast together on one of my ‘open’ days. Which led to a dinner that evening (that I also hadn’t planned for) where I met a bunch of other people that I’ll now be following up with.

Academic Cal Newport has recently published a book called Slow Productivity. He mirrors much of what I’ve written about unhurried productivity. Here’s one of my favourite quotes from Cal’s book:?

“Being busy in the moment might have very little to do with whether or not you are considered productive over the course of your entire life.”

When you build redundancy into your schedule you can easily respond to the unexpected. The same goes for building redundancy into your organisational system. When your organisation focuses on driving down costs and maximising efficiency at the expense of built-in redundancy, you’re less able to withstand the shocks and required pivots that you’ll inevitably face.

Optimisation doesn’t mean jam-packing.

Leave a little space for the unexpected.

Because there’s always the unexpected.

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