Hi!
All of us have limited capacity in every aspect of in our lives such as stress, fatigue, finances, or time. We often operate close to our limits, pushing ourselves as far as we can, then later recovering before we reach a breaking point. For example, catching up on inadequate sleep by sleeping in after several late nights.
This is fine when we can reliably predict the future, that nothing else will come about that adds on to our carefully budgeted energy, or that we will have time to recover later. However, life is often more random and harder to predict than we think. There could be sudden changes in work or personal life. In the case of catching up on sleep, something as simple as being unable to fall asleep that day (happens often to me at least).
I have been thinking that, maybe, the route to a happy life is not simply to have more resources or achievements, but instead to work on freeing up spare capacity. We then have space to take problems in our stride without being overwhelmed, and feel a sense of contentment even in harder days.
This week's article shares a similar idea, on building some "slack" into our life.
Queuing theory
One of the insights of queuing theory (a study of waiting on line) is that, close to the maximum utilisation of call centers or cashiers, response times become exponentially slower. To prevent the system from breaking down, there needs to be enough excess capacity to handle spikes in volume.
In one example, a bank has only a single teller, taking an average of 10 minutes to serve a customer, and customers arrive at a rate of 1 every 10.3 minutes. In a perfectly uniform world, the teller would clear customers with a few seconds to spare just as the next one arrives, perfectly efficient for the bank who only needs one employee. However, in reality, where service times and customer entrances are random (on the same averages), the average waiting time becomes an unbelievable 5 hours. Working close to maximum capacity has lead to a near breakdown of the system. Adding a second teller however, reduces the average wait time by 93X to an average of 3 minutes.
Cut yourself some slack
"Why it pays to cut yourself some slack" - Guardian, looks at what this example from queuing theory could mean for our own lives. When we function at the limits of our capacity, we become overwhelmed and suffer an exponential toll. It observes that we often do not leave ourselves enough "slack", especially when it comes to time. We end up taking on too many commitments till we are at our limit. Finally, it suggests that we can try and build in this "slack" by using methods to pre-determine excess capacity so that we do not overloads ourselves in the moment.
"These are the two eternal truths of slack: it really, really matters – but you can’t trust yourself to remember how much you need it."
For myself, I have a bad habit of packing too many activities in a day, and thinking I can get to back to back events based on super perfect timing estimates. What ends up happening is being tired from rushing around, being late for everything, and not spending enough time on each activity until I do not get to enjoy all of them properly. I tried to tell myself to limit activities to only one or two per day at most, but, due to abit of FOMO, I still end up trying to do too much.
What do you think about these ideas? Should we constantly get to our limits, or try and find ways to create more space in life, even if it means missing out on some things? I have been thinking about this need for capacity for awhile and hope to write more about it to develop the idea further in future newsletters.
Have a great week ahead!
James