The Most Productive Thing You Can Add May Be Empty Space

(Transcript edited for clarity.)

Hi, I'm Wes. Welcome to The Most Productive Thing You Can Add May Be Empty Space.

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Again, the most productive thing you can add may be empty space, and this is kind of controversial.

I've talked to people before that really, really pushed back on this, and I can understand that because throughout times in my life when I was in hyper-expansion or hyper-opportunity mode, I was just filling more and more.

I'd fill my brain with more stuff, more ideas, more strategies, and then I'd fill my calendar with more business, more this.

I've got to do this. I've got to get this business launched. I've got to get this business more profitable.

I've got to add, add, add, add.

And at certain times like that in my life, I might have pushed back on this a little bit.

But some of this comes with age, but more importantly, it comes with experience.

I finally realized that for me to work at peak efficiency, I need to sometimes create some empty space.

Another way to say this is margin can be a competitive advantage.

And what I mean by margin is when you've got your mind so full that you can't hardly put anything else in there, and you've got your work schedule or whatever so packed full that you can't fit anything else in, you have no margin.

No margin for error. No margin for mistakes. No margin for anything extra.

No margin for anybody else to create any distractions.

And that's not ideal because life is full of distractions and things that get in the way. That's just the way life is.

There's going to be things that interrupt, take your attention, take your time.

So what I finally figured out was it's okay to work in hyper mode, hyper-opportunity, hyper-expansion, hyper-whatever mode, as long as I gave myself, and here's the secret, I'm going to give you the big secret right now, I learned to schedule empty space every week.

I don't do it every day, but most days I do, but I learned to schedule at least every week empty time, empty space.

Now, that might sound strange.

You can just take time to think or take time to do whatever. Why would you have to schedule it?

Well, maybe you don't have to, but I have to.

If I don't schedule time for thinking, reflection, deep thought, to give my mind a break, to catch things that I would miss if I was in hyper mode all the time, sometimes my brain needs just a little downtime to reflect and to think.

So I started scheduling, intentionally scheduling time every week, usually often several times a week, where it doesn't have to be long.

It could be a half hour or an hour, where I schedule a half hour or an hour of thinking time to kind of decompress a little bit.

And I found the more I do this, that those are the times when I usually see big problems or big mistakes that I don't see when I'm full-on in expansion, building, entrepreneurial mode.

Sometimes I need to take a mental step back so my mind can see things that I don't see while I'm full-on in the problem.

So here's the question for today: Where would a little more uncommitted time, money, or energy make my life work better?

And again, this can be challenging, especially if you're entrepreneurial.

It's really challenging to convince an entrepreneurial person that they need to take some time off instead of pushing, pushing, expanding, trying to make more money.

It's not bad to be in hyper-expansion, opportunity, money-making mode, but it can be detrimental if you're in that mode 100% of the time.

But back to the question, think this through.

Where would a little more uncommitted time, money, or energy make your life work better?

If you can find just one thing, as we're going through this today, through this episode, where you could maybe improve something in your life by just taking a little bit of time, my suggestion is schedule it.

Right now, take out your schedule, and you don't have to start with a lot of time.

If you're feeling a little anxious about this already, oh no, I can't possibly take time off, just start with 15 minutes.

Take out your schedule. Schedule 15 minutes of uncommitted time where you can just stop everything, be someplace quiet, and think for 15 minutes.

And then try a little bit longer in a couple days or next week, and try to eventually get where you can spend at least a half hour to an hour every week with uncommitted time and uncommitted energy so you can let your mind work.

It can do miraculous things for you, believe me, but you gotta try it.

Now, I know some people that I've worked with, they take a whole day off every week to do this.

Now, I have done that. I don't do that often because what happens if I try to take a whole day just to think is I'll be fine for a couple hours, because I've been doing this a long time.

I'll be fine for a couple hours, and I'll decompress, and I'll be able to think, and my mind will come up with all kinds of things that I haven't seen or haven't thought about or thought about enough.

But then after a couple hours, then I want to start thinking more about getting back into action.

Oh, I remember I've got to do this, or oh, I could do this, or one of the ideas that comes to me in my downtime while I'm thinking is so good, oh, I've got to do it right now.

And then, like I say, I'll think for a couple hours, and then I'll find I'm right back into whatever mode that I scheduled time for.

So you need to practice, and you need to figure out what the best time blocks are for you.

The few people I know that will take a whole day to do this every week, they've practiced, and they understand how they work.

Now, here's another secret.

The first secret is schedule the time off, the downtime.

Start with 15 minutes, try to work up to at least an hour a week, and maybe you could even do 15 minutes to a half hour every day eventually.

Whatever works for you.

But the important thing is that you schedule it and you do it.

Now, the second secret is I always keep a pen and a paper beside me while I'm doing this, so I can quickly jot down any ideas that come to me that I don't want to forget, but that I don't want to break my downtime from and get started on right away.

So the pen and the paper is like a, oh, a safety net for me, a mental safety net.

That's the way I can relax, relax my mind, let it work, and when I have good things come to mind that I don't want to forget, I just quickly jot them down.

That way I know I won't forget them.

A system running at full capacity has no room for surprises or opportunities.

Sometimes, if you're so busy, you miss opportunities that might be better opportunities.

Scheduling a little bit of downtime will give you time to see these possible opportunities, and then evaluate them to see if they are better opportunities or not.

Margin, a little extra time, gives you space to think, recover, adjust, and respond without breaking your entire schedule.

If your schedule's packed wall to wall, then even a simple phone call you're not expecting can create real issues because you don't have the capacity or the margin to deal with it.

Busyness, not business, busyness, staying busy, can hide the cost of operating with no buffer.

Buffer, margin, little extra time, that's all the same thing.

You want to make sure you give your mind enough time to come up with these extra things, show you things you're missing, and it can be much more profitable.

That's why I said the most productive thing you might be able to do is add some empty space or some downtime.

I've found that once I started doing this and started intentionally scheduling some downtime every week, I've become more productive because the things I was working on were better supported, better thought out, and I avoided many mistakes.

Create margin intentionally in time, money, workload, and commitments.

You know, I've talked mostly about time here, but, you know, margin with money is if you can get ahead and have a rainy-day fund so you don't have to mentally worry about where the money is coming from for today, for tomorrow, every second.

It creates mental margin that lets your mind work more freely.

If you're constantly terrified about money, then it has a negative effect on you.

It can push you in some ways to some good things, but I've found 100% my mind and productivity works much better when I'm not worried about tomorrow's bills.

Now, you might not be there yet, but that's okay.

Try to figure out ways to build a little monetary margin, and then create systems, businesses, opportunities to create bigger and bigger monetary margin, and this will help you mentally, and it will help your productivity.

Do not immediately fill every open space simply because it exists.

Intentionally decide if you have enough downtime.

Intentionally decide what open space on your calendar deserves, and I'm telling you, it deserves a little bit of downtime so you can reflect and think.

Extra capacity can become an advantage when other people or systems are constantly overloaded.

And that's the big danger here.

If you're constantly overloaded mentally and time-commitment-wise, then you're not operating at peak productivity.

So again, please subscribe.

This is Wes with Your Life Systems. I hope this helps.

What's Next?

·        Find one place where your schedule, workload, money, or mental energy is operating with no buffer.

·        Schedule 15 minutes of genuinely uncommitted time this week.

·        Use the time to think, reflect, recover, or notice what you have been missing.

·        Keep a pen and paper nearby so good ideas do not pull you out of the thinking block.

·        Experiment with longer or more frequent blocks until you find an amount that improves your work.

·        Do not automatically refill every new opening; decide intentionally whether some of it should remain margin.

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