Let me guess…
You woke up with a plan. A good plan. An ambitious plan, the kind that makes you feel very smart just for having made it. You were going to get through your sessions, knock out the notes immediately after each one, eat a healthy lunch, return three calls, finish programming for the client you’re seeing tomorrow, and do some reading. For development. Because you’re a professional.
BUT…
By 11am you were behind schedule
By 2pm you had eaten something that came from a bag, standing up, over a sink.
By 6pm you were angry at yourself for being so “unproductive” because you only accomplished six of the sixteen things you set out to do.
I am extreeeeeemely guilty of this too! I assume sessions will flow into each other seamlessly, emails require no actual thought, Loki will walk himself, and I’ll always remember where I left my water bottle and never, ever, have to spend ten minutes looking for it. Ooh, look at me! I’m the magical man from Happy Land, in a gumdrop house on Lollipop Lane!
And it has taken me ages to understand that the days I plan don’t exist in nature or respect the laws of physics.
And neither did yours. While you may have felt like a super-smart go-getter when you planned your day, you were not using your very best brain when you did. You were forecasting from inside a cognitive state that was filtering out all the friction.
You have a tunneling problem.
When time is scarce—when you have less of it than you feel you need, which for most coaches is a permanent condition—your brain reorganizes around the shortage. It builds what Mullainathan and Shafir, the authors of Scarcity, call a tunnel: a tight frame around whatever is most immediately urgent, inside which your attention is sharp and focused, and outside which things don’t get deprioritized so much as they stop existing as options entirely.
The tunnel isn’t all bad. They call the upside the focus dividend: deadline pressure works, the last fifteen minutes of a meeting produce more than the first forty-five, and genuine urgency can sharpen performance on whatever it’s pointed at.
The problem is that the tunnel is excellent at managing what’s in front of you and blind to everything else. Like, actually blind. Anything that lives outside the tunnel—like, say, the solution to your client’s chronic knee pain—sits completely outside your limited awareness. But there are other shitty consequences too.
Beyond the clinical stuff, the cost I find hardest to grapple with is that the tunnel pressures me to cut corners on the work in ways that conflict directly with why I do the work. Those individual shortcuts seem defensible in the moment, but the pattern they form is not—especially when it runs counter to my values and highest priorities.
Mullainathan and Shafir have a line about this that is almost too on the nose: “Projects must be finished now; the children will be there tomorrow. Looking back at how our time or money was spent during moments of scarcity, we are bound to be disappointed.” The ledger gets presented later, when you’re out of the tunnel.
Fuck, that hits hard.
And in this way, time scarcity turns us into compulsive traders. You identify whichever resource has a little slack and you trade it for the one that has none. Money for time, mostly. Sometimes it’s rest for income. Occasionally, your own physical training for another client slot, which is a trade I’d love to see you try to defend out loud to someone who loves you.
What else? What else?
There’s the takeout three nights a week because cooking is an hour you genuinely do not have.
Oh, and the Saturday session you agreed to because the money was good and you were fully intending to rest during the week and then did not rest during the week because the week did not cooperate with your intentions, which you knew it wouldn’t, and you said yes anyway.
How about the continuing education course you bought during a window of professional optimism, watched at 1.5x speed while answering emails, and from which you retained absolutely nothing?
Your calendar has become Mos Eisley, a wretched hive of scummy trades and villainous deals.
None of these trades is irrational on its own, but they’re about as sustainable as bailing out a boat with a paper cup. The relief never comes. You are exactly as behind as you were, only now you are more expensive to operate and your pants fit tighter. And because each decision seemed reasonable at the time, you have no clear account of how you ended up here.
So what can we actually do about time scarcity?
Slack is the answer. You need buffers, margin, room to breath, time to exist, and empty space in both your inner and outer worlds.
James Clear won’t save you here. Andy Hubes has no productivity protocol for this one. And Cal Newport’s parachute got snagged on a billboard. There’s no sense in trying to optimize inside the tunnel. Batch your admin all you want; if there’s no unscheduled space in your week, the tunnel just reorganizes around the new structure and keeps doing what tunnels do. You must claw back some time AND space.
Here’s what I want you to do:
If you control your own schedule: Block out 90 minutes per week, consecutive or in two 45min chunks. The duration is less important than making it non-negotiable. Make your block a recurring event at the same day and time, and then treat it with the same sanctity as a client appointment. I don’t want you to use that block for admin, or catch-up, or planning; I want you to use it for thinking. Use the space to work through a tricky client case, or to go for a walk and ponder something from a book you’ve been meaning to actually process. Journal on the direction of your practice. Good thinking requires both time and space, and that’s what this is meant to do.
If you have some schedule agency but don’t fully control it: Insert fifteen minutes of intentional transition time before your sessions to think about the client you’re about to see. What do you know? What are you testing today? What would a different approach look like? Actively avoid falling into the trap of recency bias, avoid repeating what you did with the last client—even if it seems like a good idea. Even just five minutes of real thought before a session, when your current transition time is zero, creates a gap in the tunnel that wouldn’t otherwise exist. It won’t solve the problem, but it’ll make your work better in the meantime.
If you have little to no schedule control: Stop one bad trade. Run the accounting on a resource swap you’ve been making—figure out what it actually costs and whether the slack it promised materialized. If the trade isn’t generating what you expected, stop making it. Again, it won’t fix the schedule, but it stops the accumulation of bad trade-offs.
Feature Photo by Marco on Pexels.