When I looked at my calendar a few days ago, I realized I had fallen into a certain trap: obsessively filling every available minute. It’s not that I regret adding anything to the calendar; This seems pretty healthy to me. What I regret is the deliberate suppression of any free space in an almost artificial way.

It’s a paradox: Useful and excellent digital tools promise to help us be more productive. But in the end, they make us slaves to an impossible agenda. Shared calendars, persistent notifications, and three-click meeting scheduling convenience We created a “zero time” culture where any empty space is seen as inefficiency.

This is like urban traffic design: A city that optimizes every intersection for the highest possible flow collapses at the first disturbance. Buffer areas that absorb unpredictable events are needed. I learned this by playing Mini Highways until my hands burned, and it’s a good analogy with our calendar: to avoid chaos, you have to leave some room for improvisation, paradoxical as it may sound.

For years, tech companies have been promoting productivity tools designed to make it much easier to fill our time, but at the expense of making it harder to maintain it. The average calendar is designed to maximize meetings; does not result in time for deep, distraction-free thinking.

The problem comes from afar. In a productivity book I can’t remember, I read that in the early 2000s, when e-mail started to become a problem, managers began to get used to checking their e-mail only at certain times of the day. Similar principles are needed for our digital agendas.

Solution Start by accepting that unplanned time is not wasted time.. It is the space where strategic thinking takes place, the distance necessary for perspective. It’s where we process what we’ve learned and find creative solutions to the problems that plague us.

The best solutions I have seen throughout my life in any setting (business, academic, personal, family) often come from those who have the space to try, think, and even fail.

Our tools should help us in this regard, not hinder us. Need Calendars that help us keep such times and fill the whole day easily. Practices that help us create and defend spaces conducive to this deep work, which is the title of Cal Newport’s most famous book.

The best productivity is not the one with the longest amount of time (I call the rush hour list), but the one weighted with the right decisions and well-solved problems. This helps a lot in lightening the agenda.

in Xataka |

Featured image | via Xataka Midjourney