Buffers are not a nice-to-have
Back-to-back calls do not save time. They move the cost somewhere you cannot see it, and then charge interest.
Noor Vandel
Practice
May 12, 2027
4 min read
A calendar with no gaps looks efficient. It is the opposite. Every meeting that runs two minutes long makes you late for the next one, and being late costs the first two minutes of that meeting as well. The debt compounds across the day and gets paid off at six o'clock.
Ten minutes buys the whole day
A ten-minute buffer after every meeting does three things. It absorbs the overrun. It gives you time to write down what was agreed while you still remember it. And it means you arrive at the next call having read the name of the person you are about to talk to.
The objection is always the same: ten minutes times six meetings is an hour of lost capacity. That hour was not capacity. It was the hour you were going to spend at the end of the day writing up notes from meetings you can no longer remember clearly.
Set it once
The reason people do not use buffers is that adding them by hand, every time, is tedious enough to skip. Set them at the event type instead: a minimum notice so nothing lands in the next ten minutes, a buffer either side, and a cap on the day. Then stop thinking about it.