A few days ago, looking at my calendar, I realized that I had fallen into a certain trap: filling everything minute by minute. It’s not that I regret it add something to the calendar – that seems pretty healthy to me. What I regret is the deliberate suppression of some free space, in an artificial way.
It’s a paradox: convenient and powerful digital tools promise to help us be more productive. However, they make us slaves to impossible tasks. Shared private calendars, persistent notifications and the ease of scheduling meetings with three clicks I created a “no time” culture in which some empty space is seen as ineffective.
It is similar to urban traffic planning: a city that optimizes the intersection of each intersection to stop the flow of traffic at the first disturbance. Draw buffer spaces that are necessary for unexpected events. I learned by playing Mini Motorways until the hands are on fire, and the same is good with our calendar: we must leave some room for improvisation to avoid chaos, although it may sound paradoxical.
Over the years, technology companies have promoted productivity tools to make it easier to fill our time. The average calendar is designed to maximize meetings, not to block time for deep, free-thinking distraction.
The question comes from afar. In some productivity books I don’t remember reading agents in the early 2000s, when The email started being a problemThey started to get used to checking the email only at certain times of the day. Similar principles are necessary for our digital agendas.
The solution By first realizing that unscheduled time is not wasted time.. It is the space where strategic thinking occurs, the space necessary for perspective. It is a place where we process what we have learned and where we find creative solutions to the problems that plague us.
The best solutions I have seen in my life in any area (work, academic, personal, family) usually come from those who have space to experiment, reflect, even fail.
Our tools should help us in this, not hinder us. Necessity calendars that help us to protect that time and not only help to easily fill the whole day. Applications that help us create and defend spaces suitable for high-level work Newport’s famous book Col.
The best products are not the ones that are the longest (address of business hours, I say), but those that are weighted with the right decisions and well-solved questions. It also helps a lot to clarify the issue.
In Xataka |
Featured image | Xataka with Midjourney
