126: Creating Time Buffer—7 Strategies for Spacious Scheduling

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This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Today we're talking about time margin, specifically a sense of spaciousness. When you go about your day, you go about your week and you look ahead to what's on your calendar in chapter 17 of Free Time, the chapter called Time Block and Bake in batches. I open by talking about our inner time blueprint. Just as so many of us grew up with a money blueprint, how we think about money, how we learned about money from our parents or education, society, we also have a relationship to time. And for so many of us, if we grow up going to school, getting up really early, almost rushing to class, maybe we were almost late, maybe there was traffic, this kind of time stress first thing in the morning, going to school all day, some of you maybe like me, had after school activities stacked one on top of the next, on the next, on the next. We get home, we have to cram in a bunch of homework, we go to sleep and then we do it all over again. As an adult, I replicated that time blueprint in one of my early jobs working at Google. As I talk about often here on the show, there was one point where I was living in San Francisco and commuting on one of those famous now Google shuttle buses that would take a bunch of us down to Mountain View. And I remember I would wake up at around 6am if not earlier, try to get on the 7 or 7:30 shuttle. Inevitably because it's going down to the South Bay, there's going to be traffic, it's rush hour. There's almost no way to avoid that shuttle ride being in rush hour. So I would spend up to an hour and a half on the Shuttle, get into work. The culture at that time was meetings stacked back to back to back, all day, all week. I was very lucky and grateful to benefit from meals on campus. So sometimes I would go to the buffet, grab dinner, sometimes eat on my lap on the shuttle on the way home. And then of course, lo and behold, there's going to be traffic on the way home too. So I would sit on the shuttle for about an hour and a half and by the time I would get home, let's say around 8:30 or 9, it was time to go to bed again. I remember with my roommate at that time being like ships passing in the night, we never saw each other. There were times where I would not see my roommate for a month at a time, if not more, because she was working in investment banking. Now of course you would say, well, duh, Jenny, don't live so far away from work. That's your choice. And it was. I was young, I was not too far out of school, wanted to live in San Francisco. That's where I was born. That's where I grew up. Eventually, after about a year and a half of that, I realized I have no free time. I knew even then that there are trade offs. If I wanted to live in the city, I was going to have to deal with three hours of commuting on any given day. Cool. I did that for a year and a half. Then I realized I want those three hours back as much as I could zone out while on the shuttle. Podcasts were not yet a thing at that time, at least nowhere near my radar. This, we're talking. This was 2006, 07 and I just realized that even though I found it kind of meditative to be on the shuttle, I love being in moving vehicles. There's something it does to our mind that I find so calming. I'll link to an article in the show Notes by Jonah Lehrer called why We Travel. And it talks about how being in a moving vehicle, moving faster than we can walk, changes our brain. It puts us in a different thinking state. So as much as I saw the silver lining, as much as I made the most of it, I realized that I needed more margin. I wanted more time to myself. My personality type. I don't love living in the suburbs. I don't love being in a car all the time. And I sometimes joked when I went to school in la, I joked that LA, because it doesn't have great public transportation, it's just a lot of sitting in boxes. You're sitting in the box of your house, you get in the box that is your car. You go to another box that is your restaurant or a workspace or wherever you're going to end up. There's none of this colliding with people that I love from being in a big city like New York, where you sit on the subway car and it's just you're rich in people watching. You know, you're just crammed in with all kinds of people from all walks of life. And I really love that. As much as it's a pain carrying groceries, I don't want a car. I don't like having a car. I love to be able to walk out of my front door and be surprised by the city. Now, some people find that incredibly tiring. And for some reason, it just energizes me. So, this idea of a default time blueprint, when we then strike out on our own and we run our own businesses, we often will carry that with us. What I want to share today are ways that I have learned the hard way, of course, over the years to build in Buffer. Specifically, I'll share six ways that I build Buffer into my calendar. And this rolls up to the broader idea of calendar and time design. Because feeling a sense of time scarcity, if you are an employee, it's not always in your control. You might be expected to work certain hours. Even then, I would try to find small ways without making a big announcement. But to build in Buffer, like the ones I'm going to describe today, into your calendar and into travel as well. Part of this also has to do with me being a highly sensitive person, highly introverted person. It just takes me more time to transition between activities, between people, between types of interactions than it might take someone else. So while someone else might absolutely thrive running around and they feel super energized by, like, skating into a meeting with just 60 seconds to spare, I like to feel a sense of calm throughout my day. My dad always says, if you're on time, you're late. And if I ever made plans with my dad growing up, his car was parked 15 minutes early at wherever we were going to meet. He was always there early. And that was so inspiring to me. I just took it as a great sign of respect for someone else's time to show up early like that. And that's an example of just kind of planning ahead and giving Buffer giving time margin. So he was never, like skating in 15 minutes late saying, oh, sorry, I'm late. There was traffic. They even taught us in the early days at Google, we took this leadership workshop called Conscious Business. I interviewed Fred Kaufman on the Pivot podcast. We can link to that. And they told us there's a victim mindset and a player mindset. And the victim mindset is saying, sorry, I was late, there was traffic, and blaming being late on the traffic. The player mindset, what we were taught to adopt and really embrace and engage with is to say, sorry I was late, there was traffic, and I didn't leave early enough because traffic. You never know, living in SF or la, there is. Traffic is a way of life. It is an inevitability. You gotta get one with the traffic. And so does it make sense to blame the traffic or to blame a surprise, unexpected event? I mean, there are times I'll get on the subway in New York and it's like, sorry, I was late, the train was running local. But over time you learn, oh, okay, on the weekends, I gotta prepare for that. I actually need to leave 15, 20 minutes earlier on the weekends in case the train is running local. And that way I don't keep the person waiting who I'm gonna be meeting with. And that happened to me once with someone who was out of town. I had never met them in person before. We were gonna meet for breakfast before they had a really big meeting, and I was half an hour late because the train that's on me, I did not leave early enough. And I hate that feeling. I hate that feeling of stepping on someone else's time. So part of the reason that I've designed these rituals for myself and this amount of margin is it just keeps me calm. It has me not rushing to things and not feel a sense of time scarcity, where it's always slipping through my fingers. And this thing of there's never enough time and this feeling of being always jacked up on cortisol because everything is so stressful. And it really grinds my gears to be late. I mean, really, really, I hate it. I hate being late, especially when other people are involved with that. Let's get into seven ways that I create Buffer in my calendar and that I highly encourage you to experiment with creating in yours.

Number one, there is buffer before my first call, and there's a lot of it I will share in another episode on my morning routines. There's even an entire book that I happen to be featured in called My Morning Routine. And I share that. I don't have my first call until 11am If I can help it. Not only that, I don't check email, typically until at least half an hour before My first call. So by the time that I'm kind of ramping up to get ready for a meeting, I don't mind checking email and responding to anything urgent. Sometimes I'll start that an hour before. So let's say if my first call's at 11, sometimes I'll check email at 10. But what I most prefer to do starting around 9 is get something big done. Now I happen to be recording this in that time buffer before my first call because today I'm recording at 9:30. I did my morning routines of walking rider, doing a little bit of reading, doing my Arabic duolingo. I have all these. I actually started doing the wordle. I have all these little things that I like to do to warm up my mind for the day, to feed my mind nourishing things. So the wordle is a good challenge. I like to read some kind of nonfiction or business book. I love listening to podcasts. Duolingo warms up my brain. Walking rider gives me fresh air and movement and what wakes up my brain wakes up my mind. Now sometimes I don't record podcasts in the morning because I have morning voice. And even now I'm trying to be a little quiet because Michael's still asleep. But because I had this buffer before my first call, I was able to get in and get something done. I was traveling so I wasn't on my regular recording schedule and this needed to happen. And it's way better that I do it early than that. It slips throughout the day, I miss it, and then I'm late for the production team. So building a buffer before your first call is essentially building in time for you to do your best wind up rituals for the day and your best practice work. Do not squeeze that buffer, don't dilute it. Don't poison the well by checking little things that are either going to drain your energy or make you feel worse. So for example, if the first thing you check is social and you feel so energized and you feel even more ready for the day, that's amazing. If it inspires you, it makes you laugh, you have who you follow curated just so that it is truly an energizing experience, that's one thing. But if you're doing it out of habit, checking social media or checking email and all of a sudden you feel drained and your mood is worse and you can't really explain why, then don't do that. Build in buffer before your first meeting of the day so that that time is just for you and you really create a beautiful on ramp to your day and to your best work.

The second type of buffer to build is between calls. Now, I encourage you to use tools like calendly or to set these parameters with someone on your team who's helping you with scheduling things. Build buffer between calls. I hate the feeling of, let's say I have a half an hour call and then the next one starts right at the top of that next hour and I'm closing out on one and I'm a minute late to the next. I hate that feeling. And I used to do it all, all the time. So now I build at least 30 minutes buffer before calls and after calls. And on days like Wednesdays where I'm just podcasting all day, I build an hour buffer in between because often I like to and I need to refresh my research for that next guest. I need to close out the previous interview. We try not to run late, but if I am, I need that margin to close out the interview. Go take a bio break, drink some water, and get my head right for the next guest. Reread the notes, think about what's important that I might want to cover. Looking at what my energy and my intuition is saying for that day, for that conversation, where do I want to take this? And then showing up again in a really spacious, calm, easeful way for that next interview. You might remember reading in the book about Clara. That's an AI scheduling tool that I use that most people don't know it's AI because they're emailing a person, they're emailing Clara on my team, or I'm looping in Clara and I kind of treat it like a wink. I don't always tell people up front, but then later, I'm not hiding anything. It's in the book. It's kind of this Easter egg that it's in the book. So if you read about Clara, you know that it's AI scheduling, probably powered by a team on the back end who fixes glitchy things. But Clara also knows to build in buffer and also to set a default. So any type of let's connect call is 30 minutes. I used to default to an hour and that just filled my calendar so quickly. It just meant that there was less time and less buffer because when any meeting is an hour, then if you want to do anything else in the next hour, the buffer is going to cut into that. So I also like to set a default rule that by default, unless it is a podcast interview, meetings are 30 minutes. People have told me after reading freetime that they will even respond to someone even working in a corporate environment and say hey, could we handle this in 15 instead? And that the other person is relieved. They're not offended, they're relieved. So play around with this. When I was coaching, I had a coach give me the advice not to take the full hour for a coaching call, but to do 45 minutes. That way each person had 15 minutes after the call to take action or do any little follow up next steps. And if you are doing something like coaching, then if the call ends at the 45 mark, at least you have 15 minutes until starting what might be your next call. So 15 minutes is the least buffer that I would recommend. And so we have our buffer before calls start at the beginning of the day. Of course you're going to have buffer when calls end, but make sure that you set really spacious buffer rules for what happens in between.

We'll be right back just after this.

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The third type of buffer that you've heard me talk about many times, including in the book this Will Not Be News to youo is before and after weekends. Since college I have tried to stack my classes only on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays so that I could have a four day weekend every weekend. And that actually was not just for having four days of fun in a row. It helped me get all my homework and reading done for the week ahead on those extra days that were compressed together that I had unscheduled free time. When I was early in starting my business, I actually used to take Wednesdays off. So now Wednesday is devoted to podcast interviews, where I'm interviewing other people for my two shows. But I used to really enjoy having unscheduled Wednesdays so that I could do things like running errands, grocery shopping, even going to the museum. Anything that was going to be annoying in terms of New York City crowds. Things that get really crammed on weekends, I would do on Wednesdays or Mondays or Fridays. So I know you might know this, and it sounds obvious, but sometimes what happens is we start making one exception. As soon as you make one exception, you have one call on a Monday or a Friday, you might as well schedule the rest of the day. And even I would tell you that as soon as there's one call, it shifts everything. It's no longer a free day. It's no longer a day that you get to entirely go with the flow and do your thing or even leave the house and run errands, because you gotta get back context, switch for phone or zoom mode, and be ready for that call. So even if you cannot create buffered days looking one month from now, even two months from now, what happens when you start to consider your calendar three months from now? If you could, if you had all the freedom in the world, and many of you, if you're running your own business, technically you do. Even if it seems like this would be challenging to implement. Can you schedule a recurring do not schedule day for Mondays, Fridays, both of those, or pick any other day of the week that you want. The nice thing about taking Wednesdays off is that you have two days of intense work or meetings, and then you have a break. And then you could work just on Thursdays for calls, and then maybe Friday is a day off. So building in entire buffered days, whether it's into a calendar tool like Calendly, with your team blocking off your calendar from even yourself. Sometimes the person we most need to protect our calendar from is ourselves. Is so helpful for adding a sense of peace of mind and spaciousness. Because I don't know about you, but it drives me nuts if I have calls every day, every day of the week, it's just too chaotic for me. I'm not able to get into the deep work mode that I really want, nor am I able to get into deep rest on the days that I really need it.

Building on that buffer time for before and after weekends is number four. Building in buffer before and or after holidays. This I definitely learned the hard way. So let's take New Year's Day as an example. At least Here in the US the federal holidays. And okay, if New Year's Day is on a Thursday, we know we get that off. And then a lot of companies would also give you the Friday off. But what I found was that after a period of deep immersion over the holidays, either with family or with extended family, traveling, even doing deep work of my own during the holidays, which is a favorite time for me, oftentimes that next Monday would roll around and I would have the most epic case of the Mondays, or what now people call the Sunday scaries. And I realized that I personally want more buffer than even what is typical. So now I look ahead to the entire year. Often there's a federal holiday on a certain Monday once a month. Well, I like to then also block off Tuesday, if not the rest of that week, or again, another Stateside. Sorry. For those of you listening internationally, just swap out these examples. Let's say fourth of July holiday. Okay, it's midweek. I like to block off the entire week because what I find is that I get to build on the momentum of everyone else being offline, or at least a majority of the people that I might be working with. You've heard me mention that some of my European clients, they take the entire month of August off. No guilt. They don't even squeeze emails in where you know that they're saying they take August off, but they're really reading and working. They don't. So taking a page out of their book, I thought, what if I block all of August off and. And I just block it off so nobody can schedule into that time unless I deliberately make exceptions. Now, this past August, I actually did a ton of podcast interviews, and that was joyful for me. So I did fill my August back in. But by doing so many interviews in the month of August, I was able to create more mental buffer, or just energetic buffer heading into the fall, which does tend to get a lot busier for me with client work, speaking, traveling for speaking engagements, and by getting as many episodes in the can early as we start to approach the end of the year, as crazy as that is, then it puts less pressure on the holidays and whatever break I might want to take at the holidays. So building in buffer before and after holidays, like I said, can be a nice way of doubling down on rest when you need it and also creating extra spaciousness heading into a time where everyone else is more likely to be offline. And I just find that it reduces my Sunday scaries, or case of the Mondays, if I build in a few extra days, I Am always thankful this is something your future self will truly thank you for. So look ahead to the next holiday and see can you block off the day prior, the day after, the entire week prior, the week after and give yourself that extra margin?

Number five, let's talk about building buffer around work, travel or any travel at all. I even just came back from a week of traveling to the west coast as I'm recording this to see family. And even though I wasn't working, it was really full. It's a full day of travel to get there. It's really full because I miss my family so much and I want to make the most of every single day and every minute that I I have with them. And then coming home, there's traveling and there's also just coming down off of even again, even a week with family, even if it's not technically a work trip. So coming home, it's part of the reason why I'm recording this episode on this day because I got in two days ago and I was so out of it yesterday. It's partly that thing of getting even slightly adjusted to a different time zone, the West Coast. Normally I'm the one up first. I take Ryder out first thing and I could not wake up. I was so groggy, I had no energy. It's just the entire week kind of depleted me in a way and it also filled my heart, like in such an important way, but energetically my physical energy. I just really needed a day to do nothing. And I had one podcast interview where I was conducting the interview and it just felt like climbing Mount Everest. Having to have arrived home the night prior after flying all day to transport to and from the airports, gearing up for an interview that I was conducting at noon. Again, I'm a morning person. It just felt like nearly impossible. And normally I try not to schedule any meetings the day or even two after I come home from a trip knowing and having learned the hard way that it's harder than I always think to get right back into things. So I always need buffer time before and after traveling. When it comes to work trips, it's also really important to price for this time buffer as well. And let me explain what I mean by that. If you've read Freetime, you know that I talk about multiplying your rates by at least three to account for time, team and taxes. There's your time not just to deliver a one hour keynote, but but the time it takes to get there and back. Michael calls this the way back tax. That if something is going to kind of take you off course for an entire week. Then there's a way back tax. It takes time to get back into the groove of whatever that thing is that you had momentum around. You also have the opportunity cost of when you're flying cross country there and back or across the world there and back. That's two days where you're not doing anything else. Taxes, of course, we know. But the reason that buffer is so important and pricing in almost price buffer is that what seems like a one hour keynote. Let's say pre pandemic I would charge 20,000 and now I'm even pricing in for Covid risk of if I get sick. And that could take me out for three weeks or three months or create some really adverse effects. It could be 30,000. So the rate itself is not what I want to get hung up on here, but let's say a really almost sometimes eye popping number. If people aren't used to these numbers and you're not, let's say at this level of a speaking career, that's cool. Even if for you, $10,000 for an in person engagement is an eye popping number and you think that sounds like so much. It's just one hour. Can I really charge that much? Yes, you can. Because like I said, when I'm traveling for a speaking engagement, if an organization is bringing me in this case, I'll say across the country for one hour. It's not just the hour that I'm on stage. And by the way, I don't price based on time. I price based on the value delivered. Again with a hat tip to Alan Weiss and his whole notion of value based pricing. So I'm not even pricing on the time. But I do want to talk to you about the time in this episode about Buffer, the price, if we even want to look at the higher numbers, 30,000. I have friends and there are famous authors who can charge 50 grand for an in person or we've all read about politicians that charge 100 grand. It's not how much time it takes them to get their impact. It is the value delivered and to the size of the audience. If I'm delivering a pivot keynote to a thousand people or to 10,000 people, and I help them feel happier and more engaged in their role and more empowered and I help them make lateral moves and I help with engagement and retention. That's worth a lot of money to the company because some estimates show that it takes 30% of a person's salary to replace them. Finding new people is really difficult. There's lost time to training and onboarding new people. So you don't want your best talent to leave or to be disengaged or checked out. So that's how I think about pricing when I'm thinking about a keynote. But I also build in the time that it takes. So a one hour keynote, if it's across the country, I consider that that takes five days. And here's why. There's a day of planning and packing and preparing, that's called that. Monday. Then on Tuesday there's traveling across country. And it's not just a five and a half hour flight, it's an hour to the airport. It's getting to the airport two hours early. It's an hour from the airport to whatever hotel it's checking in and then being exhausted. I never, especially now with all the flight shenanigans, I never ever travel the same day that I'm speaking. That's unacceptable because if anything goes wrong, I would just be so stressed and nor do I travel out the same day that I have spoken. So then in this example, I get in on a Tuesday, I'll probably have dinner by myself. I'm not social at all. I don't want to see anyone. I just want to have a meal and go almost straight to bed. Try to stay on east coast timing. Then let's say I speak on the Wednesday, okay? And I've done this. Let's say my talk is one hour, but it's part of a day long event. I will attend the entire day. So I want to know what the leadership, who kicks off the event, what are they saying, what themes are they highlighting, what's important to them, what language do they use, how do they talk about the strategic priorities, priorities of the organization? So I'll get there at 8am and then the kickoff of the event starts at 9 and maybe I go on at 3. So even though I'm on stage for an hour, let's say I come off stage, there's maybe a line. If I'm doing a book signing, I'm talking to people, I'm still there all day at the venue. I do not typically say yes to do anything related to the event. One time I got invited to a happy hour afterward and I was so wiped out, there was no way I was gonna be able to do a happy hour. I don't even wanna see often friends or family. After I've done an event, I give it everything I have and I need to then go have a meal by myself again. And go back to a hotel and speak to no one. Just be quiet, rest, recharge, read and do my own thing. So I always like to stay at a hotel, not just the night prior, but the night of the event for this exact wind down. And then let's say on the Thursday I travel home, that's all the way back cross country and, and the Friday is really rest and unpacking that R and R of the exhaustion of having done this big exertion. So what I just described this five days. It might sound very luxurious. I'm not sure. To me it's necessary. It is how I show up and give that hour that I'm on stage the best I have. That way I'm not rushed. There's no risk to the organizers that I'm not going to show up. I'm not rushing off stage to get to a flight, none of it. I don't do red eyes anymore. That's way too taxing on my system. Not that I ever really did or wanted to. So this is an example of when you even have a work trip or if you're going to do a speaking gig that it's one hour. Okay, but you got to think about the very real time cost of the entire thing and building in buffer before and after a trip like this. So maybe not making too many plans before, during and after. Some people love to see as many people as they can in that destination city. I don't as much as part of me would love to see people I haven't seen in a while. I normally don't have the energy. I need every ounce of people energy I've got to do the event itself. But I know that about myself and that's one of the ways I build in buffer for work, travel. One more thing I'll say about work, travel or even travel to see friends or family. I am a real stickler about trying to stay on east coast time. It doesn't usually work, but I've been known to get in somewhere and on night one go to bed at 6pm and on night two I try to keep as close to six or seven. And I try through the course of, let's say seven days. I really try not to go to bed any later than eight if I'm on the west coast, which is hard because sometimes it's tempting to want to go out to dinner with people or see people or go out at night. And I find it so important to not be completely wrecked when I get home that I try to stay, especially if it's work travel. I really stay on my home time zone, which is Eastern time. So even if I get to a hotel, even if it's still light out, I will have a meal at 4pm and I will try to have lights out, curtains closed, face mask on by 6pm so that I'm still going to bed in my normal time window, which is what would Typically I go to bed at 8, 8:30. I'm at least in bed at 8 and I try to go to bed definitely no later than nine and so I really try to keep that when I'm traveling and I don't say yes to any plans that would interfere with that. Even as ridiculous as it sounds, I'm basically going to bed in broad daylight if it's not daylight savings time.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Strategy number six is building in one night Hotel Solo Hotel time Before seeing family, Brene Brown once talked about how on her way home from the airport she builds in buffer. Not necessarily staying at a hotel that night, but going to the spa on her way home from a trip. I find this to be really joyful. Now some of you are listening to me and you've heard me say hotels so many times. I know not everyone likes staying at a hotel. Some find it just like soulless. They'd rather even take a red eye and be back with their family asap. I love staying in a nice hotel. If it's just kind of like standard, I'm not that into it. It doesn't spark joy. And you can criticize me all you want, but there is something in my Libra heart that loves luxury. Like I love a good comfy be. I love a hotel room that has a little couch set up by a window where I can read. I love a hotel room that's just at least big enough to do yoga in my room. So it only needs to be the size of a yoga mat, but at least some space in the room for me to work out for me to read in the morning when it's a nice hotel. Typically boutique hotels, usually it's not a big chain that I would look for. There is just something so soothing to my soul and I'll link to the episodes in the show notes. I've done episodes on staycations in your same city and workcations in your same city where I extol more of my favorite kind of hotel stay strategies and I also did one on travel tips so I'll link to that look for that in the show notes too. What I find is that lately because I have a more complex family life now in New York, I'm not just living by myself. I have a husband and a doggie. I find that I need a buffered day before I see whoever I'm going to see next. So I now where I might have used to fly in somewhere and then even my friends or family or someone might pick me up from the airport. Now I actually like to get into where I'm going, especially after a long day of travel and stay in a hotel for a night before I see anyone. So I have at least one night to myself and especially the next morning. That's what I really love is waking up super early, having coffee, reading, just transitioning out of my kind of what can sometimes be chaotic life back in New York City, having this buffer day in between seeing anyone at all, staying in a hotel. Even if I could have stayed with a friend or a family member before seeing anyone, before going out and doing anything and that tends to really charge my batteries. I have not yet done the thing where I would stay in a hotel on the way home. That seems like more of a stretch. Usually I just try to fly out the first or second flight in the morning, not too early, let's say one departing at eight and I get home back to New York around five or six. Sure I'm not going to go to a hotel, but I love the Brene Brown strategy of sneaking in something for herself on the way home before everyone is just talking to her and wanting to see her and excited and needs things from her again. So you could think about what buffer could you build before and after, even something where it wouldn't be obvious to stay in a hotel.

The seventh and final strategy for building in buffer and designing your calendar to have a sense of spaciousness is before and after a big launch. One of my biggest pieces of advice to authors is that as you're planning your book tour, podcast tour, promotion for anything at all, make sure that about a month afterward, you block off at least two weeks just for yourself. You will be so glad. So even if you're not an author and you're listening to this, it is likely that you're launching something at some point where you and your team are going to do a big sprint, gearing up for the launch, handling all the thousand tiny details that are involved in a launch, then launching the highs and lows of that, the roller coaster of emotions, the logistics, any problems that crop up last minute, then you're kind of seeing the launch through. You might have more on your calendar than usual. You're meeting with your team more than usual. There is just such an intensity during a launch of anything at all that you will be so thankful your future self will thank you so much. When all of a sudden at peak exhaustion, just when you think you can't go another day, boom. There's a week, if not two weeks, of totally unscheduled time on your calendar. Right after I launched Pivot, I did an episode that I'll put in the show notes called Post Launch Pivot and the Furry Rest Monster that I picture it as the big blue furry from Monsters, Inc. That was just hugging me into the couch and demanding that I rest. And so I found now that instead of getting surprised by that, the Furry Rest Monster, I build in Buffer precisely for that. So you gotta do it far enough in advance because when you're launching, it's very tempting to fill in all that time. And it feels very justified. Cause you're saying, but I'm launching. I gotta give it my best shot. I gotta do everything I can. And surely that is really a path to burnout, because a launch is already so taxing, it's so extra taxing on your whole system. But of course, it can be rewarding too. So I'm not saying don't go hard during a launch or don't go all in, but you gotta build in more buffer than you expect.

Now it's your turn. What did I miss? What types of time buffer do you build into your schedule to keep things spacious and easeful and joyful? If I did miss anything, you can record a voice memo for us. I'll play it on a Future episode@itsfreetime.com Ask if you want to send a note. You can email hi'sfreetime.com and if you want to join us in BFF, where we talk about a lot of these strategies and share best practices and feedback with each other, learn more about that and join us@itsfreetime.com BFF thanks so much for being here listening everybody, and I wish you an even more spacious calendar with even more abundant time, energy and money moving forward. Have a beautiful rest of your day everybody.

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