Schedule Unscheduled Time
“I leave between two to four hours a day that are unplanned. In other words, schedule time that is unscheduled.”
— Shane Parrish, Farnam Street
Bestselling author and surgeon Atul Gawande does the same thing. We should pay attention to the regular habits of creative geniuses. While the exceptional stuff is interesting, and flashy, there’s something about the regular rhythms and rituals that shed particular light on what facilitates breakthrough thinking. I couldn’t help but be struck by this gem from WIRED’s insightful 1999 profile of Jeff Bezos, which illuminates an unexpected, calendarized priority:
“Bezos spends hours at a time thinking about the future: trawling for ideas, exploring his own site, sometimes just surfing the Web, particularly on Mondays and Thursdays, which he tries to keep unscheduled. ‘…I wander around and talk to people, or I set up my own meetings - ones that are not part of the regular calendar.’”
It’s tempting to think, “I’ve got pressing demands. Of course some visionary dreamer at a start-up can afford to leave huge blocks of his time unscheduled, but I’ve got pressures. I’ve got deadlines!” (I know, how’d I do that?) It is hard to calibrate the timeline and expectations, considering how far Bezos has taken Amazon from its humble beginnings. Were they even a legitimate business in 1999?
That year they had $1.2b in sales, and reached a $25b market cap, almost 17x Barnes & Noble’s $1.5b market cap.
Which is to say that a popularly polarizing figure, leading one of the vanguards of the early web “Get Big Fast” gold rush, was blocking 2 days of the week, deliberately keeping them unscheduled.
When all of our time is spoken for, we dramatically reduce the odds of surprises, not to mention shortchanging the longer-duration gestation that’s required for insight formation and creative thinking. Bezos is not the only one who’s deliberate about blocking time — there are countless examples of essentially the same priority. Too many, in fact, to discount the significance of the practice.
So when you’re auditing your calendar, don’t forget to include a line-item for “unscheduled time.”
Related: Hack A Creative Calendar
Related: Make Time For Exploration
Related: Perform An Innovation Audit
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The quality of our thinking is deeply influenced by the diversity of the inputs we collect. Implementing practices like Brian Grazer’s “Curiosity Conversations” ensures innovators are well-equipped with a variety of high-quality raw material for problem-solving.