Give Yourself a Buffer

We were on our way to the airport to fly home to visit family this Christmas when we received the dreaded email: Your flight is delayed. Unfortunately, our flight was delayed 3 hours, so we spent our afternoon in the airport. Although this was frustrating, it’s part of life. If you want to travel a lot, you have to deal with flight delays. It’s part of the deal.

Luckily for us, we had planned to arrive a few hours before our first family event. Even though it was annoying to have a flight delay, it didn’t end up being that big of a deal. We didn’t miss anything. However, if we had decided to cut things a bit closer, the flight delay would have been a bigger deal and a lot more frustrating. But since we had a buffer, the disruption was minimal.

Maximizing Our Schedule

I think this is an important lesson for our general lives as well. Usually we pack our schedule to the max, trying to optimize our experience and not “waste” any time. The problem with this way of doing life is that things don’t always work out like we planned. Sometimes things happen that disrupt our schedule. If we don’t have space in our schedule to deal with these disruptions, they have the potential to cause us a lot of stress and heartache.

Give Yourself a Buffer

To avoid these issues, give yourself a buffer. Give yourself more time and space than you think you need. Since you have an extra buffer, there’s room in your schedule to absorb the unexpected things that come up and have the potential to push you off course.