Essentialism (XXV): Execute: Buffer

 McKeown starts this section with the story of Joseph (Yes, that Old Testament Joseph) and the story of the seven heads of grain and seven cows.  If you are of a certain age, you will remember this story from its flannelgraph presentation:  the seven fat cows appearing and then getting eaten by the seven skinny cows, the seven full heads of grain being devoured by seven skinny heads of grain.  What did this mean?  A famine was coming; God was graciously giving warning of the fact.  The Egyptians, under Joseph's guidance, used the seven years of plenty to building up supplies for the seven years of famine.

They built a buffer of food - which, simply put, is something that prevents two things from coming into contact with one another.  States have been created as "buffers" to prevent other states from coming into direct contact.  In chemistry, a buffer solution can be used to help mitigate the direct contact between two elements of a solution.

Just as for Joseph, suggests McKeown, buffers play a key role in the life of an Essentialist. How?  By preparing, we can allow adequate time and space to accomplish everything that we need to.

How often have we estimated down to the minute the amount of time it takes us to get from point A to point B, only to find that the unexpected happens:  an accident, a ticket, a detour we had no idea was coming up.  How many times have we allocated X amount of time to accomplish Y task, only to find out that the task was more involved or complex than we thought and we spend far more time on it?

A lack of buffering can represent a sort of "Best Case" scenario thinking.  I have heard the called in my business career "Running The Perfect Race":  Assumptions are made that a year's worth of work can be executed flawlessly and that every manufacturing event will be completed, not acknowledging the fact that things happen and batches are lost. What this leads to is a series of reacting as we try to compensate for the event. Sometimes we can make it work:  the all-nighters to do the paper or report we committed to, the quick turn around to make another run, the remaking of six dozen batches of cookies for the party.  But all of that comes at a cost, most probably to ourselves at least and to others.

If these sorts of things happen - and they always do - how does the Essentialist build these buffers?

1)  Use extreme preparation: McKeown contrasts Roald Amundsen and Robert F. Scott in their race to reach the South Pole.  The short version is that Amundsen prepared heavily compared to Scott (4 thermometers to 1, 3 tons of food to ton, marking a supply depot with 20 markers miles apart instead of a single marker.  The ending?  Amundsen made the South Pole relatively painlessly; Scott and his team died.  

Preparing better - expecting issues, putting in slack times, acknowledging that you will not run the perfect race - makes success more achievable.

2)   Add 50% to your time estimate:  We are terrible at estimating the length a task will take. How many times have we suffered from transit issues as above?  How many times have estimated time on a task that was inaccurate.

Daniel Kahneman, in 1979, coined the phrase "planning fallacy" in 1979.  It refers to the fact that people tend to underestimate the amount of time a task will take, even though they have done the task before. In one study, only 30% of respondents in a study completed the task in the time they had estimated.

The solution?  Add a buffer.  McKeown suggests add a 50% time buffer:  "Not only does this relieve the stress we feel about being late (imagine how much less stressful sitting in traffic would feel if we weren't running late), but if we do find that the task was faster and easier to execute than we expected (though this is a rare experience for most of us), the extra found time feels like a bonus."

3)  Conduct scenario planning:  Or in the fancy words of business, create a risk management strategy to prepare against the risks of any task.  McKeown suggests 5 questions, based on the work of Erwann Michel-Kerjan:

1)  What risks to you face on this project?
2)  What is the worst-case scenario?
3) What would the social effects of this be?
4)  What would the financial impact of this be?
5)  How can you invest to reduce risks or strengthen financial or social resilience?

Essentialists, says McKeown, accept the reality that nothing can ever be fully anticipated in life.  What can be done to mitigate this is to build in buffers to manage the unexpected.

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Application:

Reading this sections comes across very much as a business sort of exercise. And in one sense that is very true:  risk management and buffering against the unknown is a trait of every successful business.  And yet, how little I apply this in my own life.

Part of this I instinctively use, brought on by my high school band teacher:  If you are early, you are on time;  If you are on time, you are late.  As a results, I tend to try to leave enough time to transport myself somewhere to arrive early.  This is easy in travel terms; I do not apply this regularly enough to all other parts of my life.

A buffer (50% is a luxury) is something I also do almost haphazardly, although I am better about arguing for time at my job.  Along with a buffer, another area of success can be simply spacing out tasks - for example, writing a post with time enough for a leisurely writing and editing instead of cramming it in on the day before (not that this has ever happened here...).

Conduct scenario planning?  I do this financially - but almost nowhere else in my life.  And yet through my job, I see the benefits of this exercise every day.

I am doing some of these things.  I could do much more of them.