Joy of Unplanned Time

• You are to pick up your child from school and reach 15 mins early and have time to kill in the car. What do you do?
• You joined the meeting on time at 3 pm, but instead of 1 hour, it finished in only 40 mins. The host happily announces “I give you back 20 mins”. What do you do?
• You were given 3 hours to finish an assignment, but you did it in 2.5 hours and had to wait while others got done. What do you do?
• You had a day-long plan to see all the interesting sites in the city, but you got done in half a day. What do you do?

You get the drift. What do you do in the ‘unplanned time’ you get, that you had never visualized you will have, in the first place? Too short to plan something big, but long enough to do something significant.

Successful people have a sort of ‘plan B’ for such moments. They will clear pending tasks or some emails to be cleared, have a few calls done or they will simply close their eyes and meditate.

But more often than not, most of us, including this author, will tend to get involved in unproductive tasks, like browsing social media. Many others will use this as a great opportunity for a ‘fag break’. 

Our lives are full of ‘planned time’ – 2 years in kindergarten, 12 years in school, 4 years in college, and then lifelong working in our ‘career’, we rarely set aside time for ‘nothing’. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, among many other execs, are famous for keeping ‘blank spaces’ in their calendar, which are ‘thinking time and no one is allowed to book any meetings. When you make ‘unplanned time’ a part of your routine, you are not caught off guard when you ‘encounter’ unplanned time. You in fact, welcome more of it.

However meticulous we are at planning, we cannot plan for everything. We cannot always be sure if things will go as per plan. There are always going to be some last-minute glitches, which will lead to some unproductive time. To be aware, conscious, and most importantly prepared for such situations is a really ‘smart’ thing to do. We keep complaining that we do not have time, we are busy in back-to-back meetings, etc, but when we really have the time, we are taken aback and do not make the most of it. Many people swear by wanting to take vacations where they will ‘do nothing and then get tired of ‘doing nothing’ as they are so not used to such a state. Then they cook of agenda do avoid ‘doing nothing’ and escape the state of ‘nothingness’. So be smart, do what smart people do, and be prepared for making the most of these ‘unplanned’ times, and get successful!!.