The blog

For you who pre­fer lis­ten­ing to read­ing, this post is also avail­able as an episode of the ​“Done!” pod­cast:

”Do you have a minute?”

If your sit­u­a­tion at work is any­thing like that of most peo­ple, then you know that unfore­seen and unpre­dict­ed things will come up through­out your day which you will need to attend to at once. You know that they will come, but not what they will con­cern or how long they will take you to deal with.

If you have filled your cal­en­dar with meet­ings and tasks to the brim, your plan will fail and you will have to resched­ule and rethink your day as soon as some­thing unfore­seen comes your way. You will not have time for every­thing you intend­ed to do, rush the tasks you need to get done, feel more stressed, and might have to work into the night as well.

Space to spare

This is why you need to have some ​”space” or air in your plan­ning — mean­ing, time that is not reserved for a cal­en­dar-book­ing or doing tasks from today’s to-do-list. How much time should you leave unsched­uled? Well, only you can answer that ques­tion since the amount of unfore­seen tasks you usu­al­ly have to deal with in a day is very per­son­al. It varies from one per­son to the next, from one busi­ness to anoth­er, and between pro­fes­sion­al roles. If you do not know how many unfore­seen tasks you have to deal with on a reg­u­lar basis and how much time they actu­al­ly steal from your dai­ly plan­ning, you will find it use­ful and enlight­en­ing to know for sure.

I sug­gest that you, start­ing today, mea­sure how much time all the unfore­seen tasks actu­al­ly take from your reg­u­lar work­day and ‑week.

Do this

If you want to find out how much time, space, or air you need to leave in your dai­ly plan­ning in order to have enough time to deal with the unfore­seen, then do this:

1. Choose a way to con­tin­u­ous­ly mea­sure how much time you spend on unfore­seen things. Your smartphone’s timer ought to be an appro­pri­ate tool. Or, you can use a tim­ing-app such as Tog­gle (Android / iOS) or Hours (iOS) (which is the app I use myself).
2. When some­thing unfore­seen comes up in the next few days which you sim­ply must attend to and spend time on solv­ing right away, start your timer.
3. At the end of the day, take a look at the app and see how many min­utes or hours you have had to spend on things you had not planned for.
4. Keep mea­sur­ing like this for as many days as you think you need to in order to see a clear pat­tern and get an idea of the aver­age amount of time spent daily.
5. Now you will have a much bet­ter idea of how much time you actu­al­ly need to leave unplanned every day in order to get through your tasks, meet­ings, and the unfore­seen that most like­ly will land on your desk or in your lap (giv­en that the unfore­seen tasks you are hand­ed are things you real­ly should con­tin­ue to do from now on and not del­e­gate to some­one else).

A more rea­son­able plan

If you find out how much time you usu­al­ly have to spend on tasks and things you did not see com­ing, it will become eas­i­er to esti­mate a more accu­rate amount of time that needs to be left free and unplanned in your dai­ly plan­ning. You will have time for what you need­ed to get done (which might now be a more rea­son­able amount of tasks than before) and you will not have to hur­ry as much as you oth­er­wise would have need­ed to.

What’s your way?

How much time for unfore­seen things did you end up with? How many ​”emp­ty hours” do you need in a day or in a week? Please send me an email to let me know. While you’re at it, share with me if your ini­tial guess of how much time it would be was any­where close to the final con­firmed min­utes or hours. 

(By the way, do you know that mea­sur­ing can help you estab­lish a new habit?)