I had two hours free one Saturday morning. The house was quiet. There was nowhere I had to be. Instead of enjoying it, I found myself wondering, what should I be accomplishing right now? Not what would restore me. Not what mattered most to me. Just what I should be doing with the time. I noticed the same thing happens when I finally sit down with a book. Some part of me starts running a quiet tally of everything else I could be getting done instead. That is when it hit me. Somewhere along the way, I had started believing that an unfilled hour was an unproductive one.
I think we have quietly decided that overwhelm is the goal.
Nobody would say it that way out loud. But look at how we build our days. Back to back, one thing bumping right into the next, every hour accounted for before it even starts. We call it being productive. We call it staying on top of things. But if we are honest, some part of us already knows where that road leads. You cannot run in reaction mode and productivity mode day after day without something eventually giving way. We know this. We have lived it.
It does not matter if you work from home and think of your schedule as your own. In some ways it has gotten worse. In an office, one meeting usually comes with a built-in pause before the next, even if that pause is only the walk down the hall to a different conference room. At home, we have lost that walk. Zoom calls run straight into each other with no travel time in between, no change of scenery, barely a moment to take a sip of water before the next one starts. We schedule ourselves back-to-back in the name of efficiency, and we end up with less breathing room than we ever had when walking between rooms in a building.
Women especially know this pattern, because we live it in seasons. Think about the holidays. We take our already full lives and stack an entire second layer on top. Parties, shopping, wrapping, cooking, travel, family, obligation after obligation, evening after evening, on top of the jobs and the homes and the people we were already taking care of before December even started. Then January comes, and so many of us crash. We do not want to see anyone. We do not want to plan anything. We are secretly grateful for the snowstorm that gives us permission to stay inside and do nothing for a few days.
That crash makes perfect sense. It is not some personal failing. It is what happens when we build a life with no margin.
So let me tell you what margin actually is. Margin is the deliberate buffer you build in on purpose, the space between things, so that one delay or one hard morning does not knock over your entire day. It is what gives you back the room to think clearly and respond instead of react. It is breathing room, plain and simple.
We have gotten remarkably good at filling that room instead of protecting it. Look at what is happening with planners and productivity apps right now. It is no longer enough to track your to-do list. Now we track our water, our steps, our gratitude, our habits, our moods, our sleep, on top of every meeting, errand, and appointment. I understand the appeal. I have used plenty of these tools myself. But somewhere in there, a strange belief crept in. A calendar with blank space on it started to feel wrong, almost lazy, like we were failing at something if an hour was not accounted for.
So we stopped blocking empty time. We started treating every open hour and, apparently, every open book, as if it were asking to be filled with one more thing.
Here is what finally convinced me margin matters. It turns out there is a real, physical reason those empty stretches are so valuable, and it goes well beyond catching your breath. When your mind is idle, unfocused on any single task, your brain shifts into what researchers call the default mode network. That is when the mind starts making connections it cannot make while it is heads down on a task. It is the same reason a good idea shows up in the shower or on a walk, and almost never in the middle of back-to-back meetings. Psychologists also talk about the incubation effect. When you step away from a hard problem instead of pushing through it, your mind quietly lets go of the same old solutions and makes room for a better one to surface. The clarity so many of us are chasing lives in the space we leave open, not in the hour we manage to squeeze out of an already full day.
This is where margin and space start to look like the same thing, just in different forms. A junk drawer crammed so full it will not close stops being useful, no matter how good the stuff inside it is. A calendar crammed that full works exactly the same way. It loses the ability to hold anything new, including your best thinking, and including you.
Margin makes room for the version of you who can actually show up. The one who has some reserve left, some ability to think clearly instead of just react when life throws something unexpected at you, which it inevitably will. That version of you needs a little empty space to exist, and she has probably been waiting a while for you to leave her some.
You do not need to overhaul your whole calendar this week. Start smaller. Look at tomorrow and find one block of time, even fifteen minutes, that you are not allowed to fill with a task. Protect it the way you would protect a meeting. Do not schedule anything else there. Do not apologize for it. Do not explain it to anyone.
Then notice how it feels to have a little bit of nothing waiting for you in the middle of your day. Or how it feels to actually finish that chapter without doing the math on everything else you could have been doing instead.
A small patch of empty space in your day is not the enemy of getting things done. More often than not, it is the very thing that lets you think clearly enough to do them well.
Talk to you next Monday, Meryl.
