The Joy Of Missing Out By Tonya DaltonUzorak

I want you to fill your calendar. Fill it up in the morning during your process time, slot in your important tasks, schedule your batches, block your time. Use your ultradian rhythm as your guide to make sure you block off time for focus and time for breaks.

Why do we want to do this? Because we want to fill it first. A wide-open calendar is an invitation for others to cram it full with their priorities and demands rather than our own.

Let’s fill our calendar with our priorities before we allow others access to our time. This helps us establish our boundaries. . . . Focused blocks of work get placed in your daily agenda first, followed by breaks.

Block out sections of time for you to work on priority items or batched tasks. Higher-ranking priorities get the lion’s share of your time, so block off those items first in your calendar. These are nonnegotiable time blocks that belong to you, so treat them as you would an appointment with someone else—you wouldn’t cancel your doctor’s appointment or arrive thirty minutes late. Right? This is an appointment with you and your goals.

Here’s the catch: to time block effectively, we need to be careful not to line up our blocks one right after the other. We need to allow for some buffers so there’s some breathing room—to allow for the expansion of ideas. Similar to when we drive our cars, we don’t tailgate and ride the bumper of the car in front of us (at least, I hope we don’t). We give ourselves a buffer of space to allow for sudden brake lights or swerves in the road.

Giving ourselves buffers provides us the flexibility we need to be proactive. The solution can be as easy as giving yourself a 50 percent buffer. If it takes you ten minutes to get to the soccer fields, leave the house fifteen minutes before you need to get there. You’ll feel less stressed and flustered, and if you arrive early, you can take that time and spend it on something you like to do: read a book for five minutes, call your mom, or do whatever makes you happy.