What You'll Discover In This Episode:
Fresh-squeezed orange juice is the best, am I right?
Have you ever tried making your own fresh-squeezed orange juice without using a heavy-duty juicer? I have. I’ve squeezed the crap out of an orange before, trying to get every last tasty drop into the glass in the name of good health and great citrus flavor.
I’ve seen a lot of small business owners do the exact same thing with their schedule in the name of productivity. They schedule every single minute of the day on their calendar, trying to squeeze every last drop out of their allotted work time. They load their schedule with back-to-back meetings, phone calls, projects, and breaks without a minute to spare.
At a glance, it might look like they have a productive day planned in which they’re going to get a lot done. What inevitably happens though, is something pops up, then they have to shuffle around the next thing on their calendar and then the next and then the next. By the end of the day, they’ve had to put out several fires, reprioritize numerous times, and roll over tasks and meetings to the next day - the snowballed repercussions of the initial unexpected event that occurred during a scheduled block of time. Rinse and repeat.
Sound familiar?
In the pursuit of being incredibly productive, you’re setting yourself up for being overworked, overwhelmed, and consistently out of time when you overschedule yourself. That’s why it’s important to schedule white space into your calendar daily as a buffer to accommodate unexpected events, meetings that run over, tasks that take longer than expected, and self-created fires.
Unsure how to effectively do that?
In this episode of Productivity Straight Talk, I dive into when and how to schedule white space on your calendar so you can minimize the overwhelm and chaos that ensues when you don’t.
This was so great! I am always reworking my schedule. This week I SCHEDULED white space. I am so excited to see how this affects my work week. Thanks for all you do Amber!
I’m so happy to hear it was helpful and you have scheduled white space!!
I was amazed at what scheduling white space did for my work this week. There were two times that could have completely derailed the afternoon but since I had white space, I worked through them no problem!