Rule #3: Preserve unstructured time
If we are to maximize our Impact upon the world, we must first experience illumination — finding the gaps in possibility, the overlaps between seemingly unrelated concepts, the glimmers and whispers of world-changing ideas not yet fully formed.
These path-defining realizations are rarely the product of intentional seeking. Instead, they come unbidden when we walk, when we shower, when we are idle and allowing our brain to process in the background. This experience, the epiphany that arrives when we’re looking elsewhere, requires unstructured time (and a profound lack of intention).
Nonetheless, we fill our days with structure. Meetings and appointments, the spaces between filled with email and text messages and quick errands, our idle time spent watching televisions and swiping Kindles — our brains may not be focused with intensity, but we demand they’re always focused on something.
This always-on function is a prophylactic against precisely the type of lazy contemplation that leads to Optimal Impact, and we can defuse its power with the paradoxical approach of structuring our unstructured time — leaving lengthy swaths unbooked on our calendars, time to be spent as we see fit in the moment, strolling, playing, drawing, staring into the sky, allowing the universe to deposit its treasures at our feet.
This is the act that we must begin to see as “work,” engaging in rest purposefully and with regularity.
Preserve unstructured time.
READ ALL THE RULES OF TIME
