The empty schedule paradox: a busy schedule equals a clear mind, an empty schedule equals a busy mind.

Imagine waking up knowing you have nothing to do today. Sounds blissful, doesn’t it? Unlimited freedom, what could be better than that?

Now imagine living that day every single day. If that still sounds fun, you’re likely ignoring the tradeoff that increasing freedom has on another fundamental human need — security.

This week I’ve been writing about how we manage our time. If we view the calendar only as a tool to remind us when we have commitments to other people and leave all other time as empty, we face the energy draining task of deciding what to work on each time we sit at our desk.

We should instead schedule appointments with ourselves, allocated to deep work. This provides 3 benefits:

1. Undertaking this exercise often shows us that we’re juggling too much, which can be impossible to know when we run our lives by a To Do list.
2. It is 10x easier to say no to distractions when we have to actively move an important task off our schedule to fit in new opportunities.
3. By blocking out our time we give ourselves a marker of whether we have been successful that day or not.

Many tasks require long periods of work before we see results, and if we have no metrics to measure our progress we are much more likely to abandon the project when things get tough. We default to freedom over security.

If we believe in our goals, our metric should simply be “did I work on what I said I was going to work on today?” If the answer is yes, we can count that day as a win.

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