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by Laura Vanderkam
"I got in the habit of leaving Fridays open a few years ago when I realized that packing my calendar too tightly was an invitation to disaster. I’d write down my priorities for the week and assign each priority a time, but inevitably, things would come up. These could be not-so-great things, like fitting in a doctor visit, or good things: a quick-turn-around assignment at a new publication, an invitation to a lunch I wouldn’t want to miss. To use Donald Rumsfeld’s phrase, these were “known unknowns.” I didn’t know what would come up, but I knew something would.
"Having open Fridays, I decided, would let me bump projects there. My priorities wouldn’t have to roll over into the next week, which probably had its own deadlines."
Wonderful suggestion! Not just creating a slack day, but slack periods within a couple of days per week. Scheduling slack time is kind of like the "gift of time" one experiences when someone cancels an appointment at the last minute.