Adding Flexibility with Buffer Times (Calendar Time Management, Part 2)

This is the second post of a series on how I use my calendar as a tool to manage my time. My first post focused on the basics where, to me, a calendar event means a time commitment, as opposed to just meetings, and by doing this, it visually shows how much of my time is already committed to things, and I don’t have much time to squeeze other things in. So, if you’ve ever felt like there just aren’t enough hours in the day, stick around. This post focuses on getting your hands on what is actually going on. I find my personal feelings of stress drastically reduce when I can actually see what is going on rather than just a feeling of impeding too much work and not enough time.

This post focuses on a current experiment of a recurring one-hour daily weekday event for built-in buffer/slack in my schedule. As I mentioned in my prior post, I have a habit of seeing a gap in my calendar and filling it whenever possible. My brain assumes my estimates are perfect (they aren’t), and if I don’t fill it, I won’t actually have enough work to do (this is very not true).

The event’s goals

I have a bunch of purposes for this event. First, it’s to force me to acknowledge that my predictions of how long things take are imperfect. And this time allows for spillover without harming my plans for other things. Reflecting on my behavior when I make predictions, I never use the maximum possible time. Moreover, I am always optimistic about how long something will take me, so I sometimes use a number below the average (yes, I track how long things take me. If you want to know how I do it, ask me as a comment and maybe that’ll be my next blog post.). Therefore, this event is to compensate for my poor prediction tendencies.

[This article is also posted on my personal blog.]

Second, this event is to handle when something comes up that I cannot plan for. What I mean by cannot plan for are things that aren’t part of my general weekly cadence that I figure out at the beginning of every semester. So that’s one-off meetings, last-minute time requests, and unexpected projects. The unexpected projects even go in this time when I can’t fit it in any other way.

Finally, this event prevents me from doing what I mentioned in my intro, filling up every minute of my work calendar.

Details of the actual event in my calendar

The event is one hour a day, usually at the same time every day. During the spring semester, I called the event “Schedule breathing room,” and it was from noon to 1 pm. I thought this would be an actual lunch break rather than working through lunch like I normally do. Over the summer, this event was called “Stop working/Buffer” from 4 pm to 5 pm each day. My intent was to encourage myself to work less over the summer compared to my normal too busy life. Especially considering I was working from home most days and my older child was home from school (or home all day during his summer break) well before I stopped working. This fall semester, it is again from 4 pm to 5 pm, and I have renamed it to “Get started early/Buffer” to remind myself this time is now for getting stuff done early, if possible, or catching up.

I have separate recurring events, one per weekday. This is to manage how, during the academic year, sometimes it’s really hard to have the same thing happening every day at the same time because meetings often get put wherever everyone is available. By having separate events, if I have a weekly meeting from 4 pm to 5 pm on a specific weekday, I can move my buffer event to before that time for the entire semester instead of each week. I could potentially even move it to a different day, so there are two one-hour buffers on one day and none on another. Setting five separate recurring events makes this much easier for a little more upfront cost.

For the first six months of this event, I always deleted it if I scheduled something for that time. After that, I switched to just leaving it in the same spot as the time commitment that got scheduled into that space. This change allowed me to better understand what I was using that time for.

How it’s going

When I looked at my calendar in the spring semester, there are two of these buffer events left. I scheduled over it and deleted it almost every…single…time. I didn’t realize I was doing this until July. Hence why I changed to leaving it there to get myself to be more honest and to understand what I was doing during that time. I clearly was using it just as free time I could allocate for work after I filled in every other empty spot, which was not the intention.

The first half of the summer wasn’t much better. I rank it as a little better because the event is there more often, and I use it sometimes for personal stuff rather than work.

My goal for this fall semester is if I do find myself with buffer time on a given day, I’ll move forward a task originally planned for later in the week. I swap the events, basically. Then, when I hit that buffer time later in the week, I have options: I’ll either stop working early, especially if I’m working from home that day, swap it with work for next week, or make progress on a non-teaching project.

So far this semester, the time is being taken for one-off meetings and overflow on tasks I was not expecting would take as long. So, I guess it is kind of working as intended.

Conclusion

To summarize, this daily buffer time is for when things take longer than planned, one-off time commitments, and to prevent me from overcommitting. Given my system, my brain tends to add things to my calendar until there are no more gaps. So rather than fight my brain, I’m short-circuiting it by presenting it with a filled calendar that is technically not filled. Hopefully, my brain doesn’t go, “I know those events are actually gaps, so I’ll treat them as gaps, and schedule things anyway!” But we’ll see. Maybe I’ll write a follow-up post after another few semesters. For now, my next post is about color coding and why it can be useful! Or why my calendar looks like a riot of disorganized color.