Building the Buffer: Margins for Sane Living and High Quality Work in the Social Sectors

Building a buffer in your work and life makes achievement and tranquility an achievable process. This buffer is a safety net of time, money, expectation or other currency to protect yourself as you take smart risks to learn, experiment and perfect your social sector mission and life. 

I’ve lived for many years without an adequate buffer of time and money. This meant signing up for work related projects with timelines that require everything to go perfectly and according to plan. The no-buffer-life meant that I was living without an overall financial plan and without an adequate cash cushion if that work ended, or if I needed to move on. Bufferless life meant saying yes to too many things in work and life and reaching burnout overload. After learning and implementing the buffer approach with time, money and boundaries I have drastically increased my tranquility and achievement while also reducing my fear of  change or massive disruption. 

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Common fallacies about risk and examples of smart buffers
There is a common fallacy that high achievers in social and private sectors achieve outsized results based on high risk strategies where everything was on the line. I’ve heard so many stories about both entrepreneurs and aid workers who ‘risked it all’ for a big payoff.  
This is false logic.
The high risk strategy may work occasionally, but sustained success requires a systematic approach and smart planning.  While deep and total commitment is essential, high performers create buffers for themselves and their projects to protect against major loss if the experiment does not go according to plan. 
The founder of DonorsChoose.org worked as a high school teacher for years while developing his revolutionary site as a side project. He continued to pursue his core career and contribution as he explored this new option, only transitioning full time to the project when there was clear momentum. Sir Richard Branson negotiated a full money back guarantee on the initial jets that he purchased for Virgin Atlantic to minimize risk to his investment if the airline was unprofitable. 

Types of buffers
In his book Essentialism,  Greg McKeown identifies the consistent technique that high performing essentialists use to achieve their best output in life and work.. Essentialists “build in a buffer for unexpected events and practices extreme and early preparation”. 

These buffers mean the following things to me: 

Financial - Having enough money saved (6 months of living expenses at least),  allows you to walk away from any project with enough time to find new focus. This also means working toward financial independence that allows you to choose your social sector focus without paycheck constraints. There are many levels of financial buffer, and Mr. Money Mustache describes them here. Financial buffers for me mean saving and investing 50% of all incoming money. This keeps overhead low while taking care of long term retirement planning (solo as a business owner), and shorter term buffers (essential to have a running cost account, considering life and work’s inevitable fluctuations). 

Time - Building in more time than the minimum to complete large and small deliverables. Greg McKeown recommends the experiment of adding a 50% buffer to your initial time estimate and then enjoying the luxurious feeling of finishing early. While this may not be possible, even a 20% buffer can make a vast positive difference. Delivering early makes both you and your client feel good about the project and inevitably enhances your reputation.

Network - Build a natural network of people in your work and life where you add value before you need help with any issue. Understand their focus, aspirations and dreams and share your knowledge to help them. When you need something in the future they will be happy to add that value back to you in a mutually supportive exchange. This is something that I’m working to improve by being more deliberate about helping people regularly in my personal and professional networks. 
Knowledge and Skills - Even if you are a highly specialized professional, look at ways to grow your knowledge and skills through reading, courses and active learning to have alternative means of making a living. Early on in my career I spent time between international disaster response deployments and  working as a carpenter. These tactile skills were immediately satisfying, created self reliance, offered an alternative work stream, and helped us eventually build our own house, with help from friends. 
Lifestyle Flexibility - Develop the ability to scale up or down the  things that you need to survive and be happy, like food, shelter, transportation, education, and communication. Practice cutting back on some of these even when not necessary, to experience the feeling of consuming less. When you are forced to reduce, the hit won’t be so hard. For me this means occasionally eating beans, rice and greens for a while rather than our standard top shelf organic food, or sleeping outside rather than on our cushy king sized bed. Our family also tries to get out on the road for a ‘summer migration’ every so often. Part of the trip  involves car camping, part will be a  visit with friends and part is international travel. We love being away from our possessions and home for a time, and can live happily out of a small bag and a surfboard/bike topped car while on the road. I’ve noticed that my happiness doesn’t change much with these fluctuations and it makes me less dependent on perceived stability and financial earnings. 

A 10 minute buffer example
Earlier this year I faced the fortunate ‘problem’ where several of my projects and other work in humanitarian response consulting scaled up unexpectedly with challenging deliverables due at the same time. Coincidentally I was sick for several months and this delayed my progress. Having recently launched this site, I was eager to continue  writing posts and adding resources that are useful to readers, but felt that this additional work was impossible given my other commitments. I deliberately put the project down for several months. This slowed momentum and made me question my commitment to  the project. 
I was eventually able to overcome this block by learning and applying the 10 minute rule. I made a pact with myself to work only 10 minutes per day on the project no matter what other pressing issues were demanding my focus. This made the mental inertia of the task seem small, as I can do anything for 10 minutes. It also demonstrated consistency and commitment to myself as a small win. I found that even small periods of focus can yield outsized benefits to a project since you are enabling the subconscious attention, and removing the fear of inactivity or failure by simply starting small. Over time, that 10 minutes quickly morphed into longer periods of focus. The 10 minute rule allowed me to remain focused and productive on my many projects despite multiple high-focus demands from work and family. 
Buffers and good risk
A proper margin does not mean that you take fewer good risks and hang back in a fearful state. To the contrary. The safety margin  makes it possible to take the big risks since you have allowed yourself a cushion of time, money and other currencies to allow the confidence of undertaking additional experiments and risks. More experiments lead to a growing body of work. This increases your chances of striking that great idea, social sector project or business that leads to a breakthrough. Buffers help you build that body of work. 

Happy trails!