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If I can wake up one fine day and see that I have all the time in the world but no task on my To Do List, I would be pleasantly surprised. It would probably mean that I have accomplished everything that I ever wanted to do with my life.

I am not talking about a situation where I am stuck someplace where, although I have so much to get done with my life, and I am not able to do the things that need to be done. I am talking about not having anything on my To Do List at all!

At my job, we are nearing the end of a project that my team and I have been working on for a little over six months now. Like most projects, there have been tough times and problems, but all of them were taken care of in time. As we near the end of the project, things started looking better than we had expected. My team’s earlier efforts had begun showing fruits, and everything was going so smoothly that pleasantly unexpected pockets of spare time started showing up.

One of my team members came to me yesterday and said that he was feeling uncomfortable because there was not enough on his plate to make up for a day’s work. I told him that he deserved it for all the hard work and extra hours that he had put into work earlier when it was required for the project, and that he could use his spare time now to work on enhancing his skills and knowledge. I asked him whether he had anything on his mind that he wanted to do in the available time, and from his reaction I could see that he did not have anything planned. In response to that, he just repeated that he was feeling uncomfortable about not being able to show output for his time at work, and that he will think about what else he can do with his time.

You see, my team member did not have anything planned for himself just in case he gets some time. Actually what it meant was that he did not have enough stuff planned for the sudden burst of free time that showed up.

Now there is one thing about such sudden bursts of free time – they disappear just as quickly as they appeared. Before you digest the fact that you got this time out of nowhere and plan for what can be done, the next critical task comes up and there is no more free time.

Some people go with the flow and do not even have To Do Lists. Many who maintain such lists, have loads of small stuff that needs to be done when they can make some small pockets of time, and that’s just fine. What most people fail to also include in these lists, is concrete items that can be done at the first opportunity of a significantly larger duration of time.

Have you ever been in a situation where a huge chunk of time suddenly becomes available, and you find yourself struggling to figure out what it is that you could do to make the best out of that time?

These are all opportunities. To make use of the time wisely, you have to be ready for those opportunities.

The secret is to take a good look at all the areas/situations of your life that are busy most of the time, and figure out tasks that you could complete if you get sudden spare time in varied sizes of chunks – like, for example, 10 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, half a day, a whole day, a whole week, or even a whole month, half an year or for that matter even a whole year!

It is not sufficient to just have some vague items that are large enough to fit those slots. The items should be concrete and actionable, without which that time may fly by before you even get started.

Can you clearly tell what it is that you would do for each of those above durations of free time, if you were to suddenly find yourself in one such situation? I doubt more that 3% would be able to answer that in the affirmative.

The problem is that we only plan our tasks taking into account the average day – which also happens to be not exactly the kind of life we would like to settle for. We always want growth or change, and yet we fail to plan for those bursts of time when we actually encounter what we really want in our life – more of free time, which, ironically, is used to strive for more accomplishments.

How about you? Do you plan for those unexpected bursts of free time? Do you plan beforehand for only short bursts, or also unexpectedly huge chunks of such time?