It is well established: there exists a fundamental difference between work or non-work time spent on planned (by choice) action and work or non-work time spent reacting to a situation (“putting out fires” in modern parlance).
The latter is often cast in a negative light: “stop reacting and start acting,” “how to take back control over your time,” etc. It is well known that people who truly have control over their time only ever take planned and deliberate action. Reaction at the behest of external pressures is the sad domain of the delegate who has yet to attain true agency over her life.
While this concept emerges - I believe - from a grain of good intention, as usual the “optimizers” have scoped themselves out of reality.
Why?
Because there has never and will never be a time when one can totally eliminate the need to react, when one can gain complete and certain unobstructed control over all of one’s time.
It Happens to the Best of Us
Allow me to present a simple example: what would you do if a water pipe in your home burst right now?
Emergency repairs, cleanup, dealing with your insurance company, landlord, or both, rescheduling meetings and cancelling plans, and easily twenty plus hours out of your next 1-4 weeks (if you’re lucky) would be the order of the day.
No matter how well planned that particular week was, no matter how much “control” you have over your meeting schedule, inbox, or daily routine, you would need to shift into react mode.
And this is the point. Crises of varying shape and size will emerge from time to time. Pretending that they will not or that we can somehow optimize our lives in a manner such that they will not impact us is folly.
So, rather than seeking to eliminate by draconian control - control which I hope the above has convinced you is ultimately not possible - seek to understand and anticipate.
Know Your Risk Factors
Everybody’s life carries different factors which increase or decrease one’s likelihood of an event occurring which requires some kind of drop-everything reaction.
When you acknowledge and (to the degree you can) plan for and anticipate the need for reaction time in your day-to-day and week-to-week, you take back actual control.
Do you have kids or aging parents? Clients? To what degree do you set the terms of your own work? Does spring usually bring a new round of unexpected home maintenance? Does work have a busy season?
The answers to these questions and others like it (which only you know to ask) drive how much you need to balance and plan for reaction vs. action in your day.
For example, I know that on any given day I’ll need to set aside about two hours for unplanned work.
A client will ask for something new, a colleague will need something from me that only I can support, an HR issue will pop up that needs immediate fixing, or my refrigerator will stop working.
This isn’t steady, of course. There will be days when nothing unexpected happens and there will be days when something completely explodes and I’m occupied for hours. Overall, two hours a day is a reasonable expectation for me.
By knowing this, anticipating this, and not resenting this, I can plan.
I can allocate only about eight hours of work into my daily planning (I generally plan to work about ten hours each day - I realize others do things differently), leave gaps in my meeting schedule, and otherwise pre-accommodate for a fire the shape of which I cannot predict, but about the existence of which I am quite certain.
Control?
Nobody can honestly say they have 100% control over their time.
The more resources somebody has, the more likely they have a higher degree of control and agency. At the end of the day, however, something will always stop even the most well-equipped person.
So know your risk profile, your threat model for what might get in the way of a well-planned day or week, and plan it in.
This will vary for everyone. Some people’s work is more resilient and predictable, some people have PAs to take care of personal issues that pop up though have 24/7 jobs. There exists no one-size-fits-all approach. What does apply universally is the need to be aware of what impacts you and accommodate for it in your planning
To me, it comes down to intentionality. You can accept, intentionally, that there are times when you will be forced to react to a situation without giving up agency over your work or your non-work life.
Those who claim that you must have control over every minute of your day to maintain agency are selling a bill of goods that simply does not exist.