Every weekend, there are jobs that need to be done around my house, in the garden, or at the stables with the horses that my wife has. They are about 5 minutes up the road on a farm with about 20 other horses.
It's unpredictable (mostly because of the way we live our lives). So if I pitch up on a Saturday thinking that there's nothing to do, I'm going to be disappointed as part of my Saturday gets taken away doing the things that I have to do just to keep things rolling along.
A classic example is doing the horses on Saturday and Sunday evenings. My wife loves the horse stuff; she'd be there all the time, and so she volunteers on Saturdays and Sunday evenings sometimes to 'put the horses to bed', which consists of putting 20 odd hay nets, mucking out her own horses a little bit, and just generally settling everything down.
Sometimes, I need to go to that to help, or sometimes I don't, so I'll assume every week that I do, and then the weeks that I don't, I get some time on a Saturday evening to do something else.
The same goes for jobs during the day. Stuff that needs to be done: sometimes I have to do it, and sometimes I don't, so if I assume that I'll spend part of that time doing it and I don't have to do it, I get the advantage of something else.
We all need slack in the system everywhere. We all need to assume that work will take longer than it actually does so that we've got a little bit of space just to breathe, just to be ourselves, smell the roses, and look around.
Pretending that you can sprint a marathon is madness.
Blog Post Number - 4086