This might surprise you.
Do you know the one productivity hack that lowers our productivity and overwhelms us? Packing your calendar back-to-back with tasks and to-dos.
I know it sounds quite ironic but let me explain using an analogy.
Imagine that you want to maximize the number of vehicles flowing through a highway (‘throughput’).
If you have very few cars on the road, the throughput is very low.
As the traffic density goes up throughput keeps rising. But at some point, there are so many cars that they start creating ‘friction.’ Now you have a traffic jam.
Now just imagine — what if you fill the highway with cars, leaving practically no space. What do you think will happen? The traffic will come to a grinding halt.
That is what happens when your calendar is jam-packed. It leaves no room for overflow and unanticipated tasks. Also, when there is so much to do, you get overwhelmed and your stress goes up.
When stressed, your ‘thinking brain’ (the pre-frontal cortex) is less in charge and you get unfocused and distracted. In some cases, you just freeze. And from there on, it just spirals down.
We need to plan and we need to have tasks. But it should not be jam-packed — keep enough buffers.
If you expect to finish all tasks in their allotted time and move on to the next one without breaks throughout the day, you are packing the highway. Don’t do that.
– Rajan