JUNE 25 — “I’m four minutes ahead of schedule? This is unprecedented. I don’t know what to do with myself” — Andrew Shepherd, The American President It’s a paradox. Open-ended, “free” time ─ or what I call unstructured time ─ is the time during which there are no obligations or requirements to do anything other than what you decide yourself to do.
The problem is that for many people, the moment they get such “time to themselves”, they immediately obsess over “what I should be doing, now that I have free time”. It’s like the story of the dog chasing the car. He barks and runs after the car, then finally catches up — but what happens next? Bite it? Bark some more? Piss on the tyres? Unstructured is undomesticated Unstructured time is especially problematic for people who have spent their lives in quasi-OCD mode: Strict schedules, goals and objectives, tasks and deadlines, work, work, work x infinity, etc.
To be (miraculously) given a slice of time devoid of “something to accomplish” can be a source of boredom, stress, anxiety and (gasp!) mild terror. I knew a company director who was given an all-expense-paid trip to Scotland. It was a three-week vacation FOC.
That’s 21 days of doing nothing but eating haggis, deciphering what the Scots are saying, and hunting for the Loch Ness monster. Know what happened? He flew back after four days. Couldn’t take the pure nothingness and horror of having no meetings to chair, no subordinates to instr.
