Does it feel like your hair is on fire all day long? Do you tend to run late?  Do you schedule things back to back?  Does it feel your roles are bleeding over into each other? Do you get bombarded as soon as you walk in the door?  It’s time to build in buffers. 

A buffer is space between two things to keep them from colliding.  Buffers give us breathing room, they give us space to deal with the unexpected things that come up, help us set boundaries, and allow us to dictate the flow of our day. 

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, or that you need more time to reset between events in your day, you need to build a buffer.  You need to create space in your day.

I want to share three types of buffers.  The most straightforward and common one we hear is a time buffer.  Less common types of buffers include mental buffers and physical buffers. 

Time Buffers

If you schedule meetings or appointments back to back, you have no time to reflect on the last one before you jump into the next.  There is no room for the first one to run late or take extra time to answer questions.  There is no room for traffic or other unexpected things that often come up.  There is no time for you to take some quick actions from the last meeting or appointment.  There is no time for you to refocus and prepare for what’s next. 

A time buffer is creating a block of time in your calendar after an event that allows you to decompress, recover, reset, refocus, put out fires, answer questions, hit traffic, etc., before you have to get going on the next thing in your calendar. 

How long your buffer needs to be can change based on factors like whether an event tends to run over, how draining you think it will be, the bandwidth you have that day, etc.  You should actually schedule a buffer into your calendar (especially if others have the ability to schedule things into your calendar).  If you think it will take 20 minutes to get somewhere, you should plan to give yourself 30.  We tend to estimate time based on best case scenario (as in no traffic or accidents or needing fuel), so giving ourselves 30 minutes allows for a more realistic commute window.

 

Mental Buffers

How you transition from one mental space to another.  Think of a mental buffer as a warm-up or cool down.   A mental buffer acknowledges that to do the next task, you need to be in a different mental or emotional space or state than you are in right now, so you need to transition to that state.  This is like getting to work and it taking a while to “settle in” to work mode, or getting home and needing some space before your family jumps in and needs something your energy and attention.

To create a mental buffer, you need awareness, time and tools.  You need the time it will take to implement tools to collect yourself and raise or lower your mental and emotional energy to match the situation you are about to face.  For example, acknowledging that you aren’t in the right mental or emotional space to respond to and sensitive email or have a difficult conversation, so you deliberately decide to not tackle those tasks RIGHT NOW.  Then, you deliberately choose to use a tool like rhythmic breathing, loving kindness meditation, mindfulness, or exercise, to deliberately change your mental and emotional energy to get where you need to be for the next task.  You can’t have a tough conversation with someone if you are depleted or if you are on edge.  Getting where you need to be mentally and emotionally to be present and engage effectively with others is a service to you and to the other person. 

 
Physical Buffers

Physical buffers look and sound more like boundaries or containers and are intended to protect physical spaces and the mental energy around them.  It could be keeping work and electronics out of your bedroom, creating physical buffers to protect sleep.  It could be creating a specific area in your house where work or homework are done.  This not only helps keep your home more organized, but it protects mental space.  If you are trying to focus in the same physical space where you relax, sleep, or play, it will be hard to maintain focus because your brain associates that space with other things, not with work.  A physical buffer can also be leaving your work station for lunch and breaks. 

 
Some work from home experts go as far as to recommend separate devices (here, here, here, here, here and here).  As in have a work computer and a personal computer, have a work phone and a personal phone.  That way, when it’s time to put work away, you completely separate yourself from the work devices and only use home devices.  You aren’t tempted to switch screens and check work email because it isn’t even set up on your personal device.  I understand the logic here, and acknowledge that it’s not necessarily a practical or a feasible options (as I type from my both business and personal laptop and check social media on my both business and personal cell phone). 

 
What can you do to create space in your day?  What do you already do to create breathing room?

Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz is a really interesting book to read. It's easy to assume that having choices is a good thing. However, having too many choices can create a larger conundrum than having limited choices. is a powerful and motivating book. He describes the challenges with making decisions with too many choices, and provides some guidance on how to navigate those tricky situations. ​

If good enough means we put in our best effort, that’s great, only “best effort” is hard to measure.  My best effort on a task is probably different than your best effort.  But even within myself, my best effort on a task might change based on time, energy, competing priorities, etc.  Is my best effort my all-out best effort?  Is it the best effort of what I have to give that day?  Is it my best effort of what I have to give that day if I ignore everything else?  How can I use best effort as a benchmark for good enough if best effort isn’t constant?
​Another reason to redefine our standard for good enough is Parkinson's Law.  Parkinson's law states that work expands to fill the time allotted.  At my old job, if I only had an hour to prepare for a training, I could spend that whole hour preparing, organizing my notes and reviewing timing.  If I had a full day to prepare for a training, I could spend the whole day preparing, organizing my notes, rehearsing, reviewing the timing needed for activities, etc.  I had a core set of things I did to prepare, beyond that, I could spend a little or a lot of time preparing, but beyond those core things, the rest was just busywork.  If you have weeks to spend writing a paper, you could spend weeks writing that paper.  If you only have tonight to write that same paper, you could write it tonight.  It should be noted, that shrinking the time window for a task can result in rushed and sloppy work, but the point I want to make with Parkinson's Law is that while chasing “good enough,” I could spend a little time or a lot of time.  Based on how much time I have, my standard for good enough might need to change.  But If I allow it, chasing good enough can take way more time than is appropriate for the task. 
Finally, and this is what I try to focus on the most when defining what good enough means to me, is diminishing returns.  There’s a point in my productivity where suddenly it’s a lot harder to get the same results.  For example, in school, I knew about how much effort I needed to put into a class to get the grade I wanted.  I could put more effort in to get a higher grade, but it would have been an extraordinary amount more time and effort to get the extra few points.  Proportionally, it was a substantial amount more effort for only a slightly higher grade.  This turning point, where it suddenly takes way more effort to yield the same increase in outcome, is the point of diminishing returns.  This is the point where I try to place the good enough mark.  I could do better, but it’s not worth the extra hustle to get to that mark. 

I like working hard on things I care about.  The more I reflect, the less I like hustling.  To me, hustling is running around busily spending energy that doesn’t necessarily yield a better result.  It’s spending energy to prove my worth instead of knowing I am enough, regardless of how I do, what gets done, and what doesn’t get finished. 

If you find yourself hustling for the extra results, ask yourself two questions:

• “Is this where my energy needs to be?  Would it better serve me on something else?”
• If this is where your energy needs to be, keep going and be awesome
• If you don’t need to be spending the extra effort on this, accept good enough and move on
• “What’s driving my need to put in extra effort here?”
• If joy, fulfillment or knowing this is a time to rally is driving the extra effort, keep going and be awesome
• If the need to please, prove yourself, or show your worth by being perfect, shame or fear is driving the extra effort, accept good enough and move on

When evaluating the big things in your life, it’s important to remember there’s a time to rally, and there’s a time to move on to the next gig.  There are things in your life that are worth the extra effort to strive for your best.  But there are things in your life that aren’t worth your extra effort.  It’s important to determine what these are ahead of time before you get stuck hustling on the hedonic treadmill. 

In my last post, I discussed how we miss the point (and power) of optimism when we think optimism is viewing the glass as half full and pessimism as half empty. 

Optimistic thinking is incredibly powerful, but we have to take it beyond the image of “glass half full” thinking and just seeing the good in everything.  We need to identify what we did to fill the glass and what we can do to keep filling the glass.  In this, we discover the super power of optimism.  In these next few posts on optimism, we’ll explore ways to not only fill the glass, but keep the glass full in the face of events and circumstances that threaten to empty it.