Open space invites opportunity
How to welcome new and wonderful things into your life
One of my foundational rules of time management is to build in open space. That is because stuff comes up. Something takes longer than expected. Things go wrong. When you have open space, you can deal with these inevitable emergencies without taking time away from other things you care about. If you’ve got two hours open at the end of the work day, a client’s new questions don’t derail your planned trip to the gym. If you’ve got Friday morning open, then Thursday’s unproductive team brainstorming session that has to be redone doesn’t force you to borrow time from the next week. There is space to absorb the overflow.
But even if nothing goes wrong, this open space can still be useful. Many of us don’t have much time to think or to follow threads in our lives. I was speaking with a woman recently who mentioned that when she left a Friday open, and didn’t schedule any meetings or calls, she decided to use the time to analyze the previous year’s sales. The resulting report proved incredibly useful for her team and company. If she had a day full of meetings, that wouldn’t have happened.
Chasing opportunities
Fundamentally, I think that open space invites opportunity into our lives in a way a cluttered calendar can’t. That’s because most opportunities don’t come gift wrapped. Someone isn’t going to just show up in your office to suggest a huge, career boosting project where everything has already been approved and there’s a ready-made budget.
Instead, what tends to happen is that you get an email from someone you haven’t heard from in a while, and since you have a little extra time, you respond. The person calls you up and you chat and you get together for coffee and then he mentions that you should meet his former colleague Bob because Bob and you both used to work in commercial real estate and have a similar sense of humor. Because you have a little extra space in your schedule, you say sure, introduce me to Bob. You and Bob chat and lo and behold, it turns out that Bob’s best friend now urgently needs this huge project that you are supremely qualified to bid on. You quickly turn around a proposal and there is your huge career-boosting project. It is serendipity, sure, but it only happened because you welcomed something new into your life. If every minute had been spoken for, you might never have even responded to the first email.
Making better choices
I know it’s hard to leave open space when there is so much going on. People often tell me that it feels irresponsible to leave open space. But here’s the thing: open space doesn’t stay open. Eventually we will be on the other side of any given moment, and the time will have been filled with something. But it can’t be filled with the useful stuff — thinking, following threads, reaching out to that random person — if you fill it with less useful stuff.
So today, think about your schedule and where you can force in a bit more space. Can you schedule an open hour after lunch, or before quitting time? Can you leave a morning open each week, or maybe an afternoon? How about a full day? It can be hard at first, but over time it might get easier. And as you start coming up with good ideas, or pursuing speculative things that start to work out, you’ll become more motivated to leave the space open. A team wants to meet to discuss something that you really think could just be an email and you think hey, is this worth forgoing my really good ideas to have? Chances are…no. So you use the time for other things — and feel less busy while getting more done.