Fill the Gaps

There is a scene in the Friends TV show when Ross is on sabbatical. He is complaining to his friend Joey that he completed a bunch of chores and still has nothing to do.

Joey’s advice was to slow down and stretch out the things on his to do list. He said he shouldn’t have done it all in a few hours in one morning, but rather should have made it last all week.

I recently had a conversation with my brother. We were talking about this phenomenon of stretching what we have to do to fill the time.

I have seen it with my daughters also. They may take all evening to put away their clothes. But if we tell them to finish up so we can get some ice cream, suddenly it gets done sooner.

I do this also. At work we have busy times and slow times. I’ve noticed that the busy times force me to be more efficient. I must increase the pace to avoid working all weekend. But once the work slows, I still feel busy without time to work on smaller tasks. Somehow, I feel busy regardless.

While everyone has a tendency to do this, it can be devastating. It causes us to always feel too busy for the items we dislike. It makes it seem as though we don’t have enough time.

I decided to change this and set out to accept more into my daily list. If someone asked me to do something, I couldn’t say I was too busy. I had to find a way to take on more without it impacting what I was already doing.

This forced me to become highly efficient. It was great to see my ability to expand my capabilities to accomplish much.

But as that busy period ended, I found that I was able to fill the time that was left when those projects were completed. Somehow, I was still just as busy. My output wasn’t as high. I wasn’t getting as much done even though I was just as busy.

This is one of the tremendous benefits of the systems and habits approach to improvement. We start to analyze our day. We start to spot our habits. We see what we fill our time with. We start to carve out time to do what we need to improve.

We know that we are going to be busy no matter what. We know that we won’t feel we have enough time. Yet we understand its value so we find a way to fit it in.

This also allows us to go through the ebbs and flows of work without falling off track. We can establish the right routines and then stick with them. We can accomplish more by trying less because it becomes habit. It is more natural to do it than avoid it. During busy times, we do them out of habit, even though we are swamped with work.

If there are things you want to get done, but feel you just don’t have the time, evaluate the routines in your life. Maybe there are small gaps that are filled with TV, surfing the internet, Facebook scrolling, or video games.

If those are items that provide value, keep doing them. But often, those are the time fillers. They can eat up 5 minutes or 5 hours. They fill it up, so you still feel too busy to do those things you don’t really care to do.

I’ve found great potential sitting there in those items. I’ve removed most social media apps from my phone because I don’t want to get sucked in. I’ve designed routines to help me fit in those activities that help me better my life so they get done.

You may be overwhelmed. You may be busy. You may not have any time left in the day to work towards your goals. But I bet if you really evaluated it, you would see what I saw. I noticed a lot of wasted time in my day. I had fillers that would stretch to fill any open time available and deceive me so I thought my schedule was full, when I could find the time to work harder in the areas I wanted to improve.

Take a note from Friends but do the opposite. Instead of trying to fill your day with whatever you feel like doing at the time, fill it with strategic action. Find ways to choose the direction to take your life and then fill your time with the steps to get you where you want to go.