Do you build in time for overrun?

I've read and heard 'horror' stories from friends and colleagues about being booked back to back in meetings.

I suppose I've been pretty lucky that it hasn't really been an issue for me - until it was.

Calendar Appointments

Being honest - I've now got to the point, if it's not in a calendar (with a reminder), it's not going to happen! 😊

So it needs to be booked in for the time and timings that I've been given.

I thought I had (OK - I had) but in this case it turned out wrong.

Given a choice I like to give myself a buffer of 30 mins, 15 mins at the very least.

What I didn't take into account was that the meeting would overrun by slightly more than the 15 mins buffer I gave myself!

(Next time I'm going to just assume that the meeting will take a whole hour and not the planned 45mins, and schedule around that.)

I'm trying to take better care of myself and that includes going for a walk everyday.

While I'm not the faster walker out there (thankfully, not the slowest either), it usually out walking for around 45 mins to complete a lap around my local park.

So I try to make that happen every lunchtime (during the week), and I don't want to walk around the unlit park when it's dark (looking forward to longer days again), so lunchtime is basically it.

But that extra overrun messed up my entire plan!

Now the other thing I should mention is the simple fact that if I'm running a training session, I can't just 'turn up' at the start time. I need to ensure that I've got everything ready for the session (opening files, saving them, systems are ready and running, etc).

This all takes time - so when I have something around 2pm, and it's just after my lunch break, everything overrunning eats into that time.

In this example, I barely got my lunch, I didn't get my walk, but I was on time for my training.

I could go the other way and plan in plenty of time for a buffer, but that has it's own problems.

Next time, I need to remember to leave additional time - just in case....

Do you (or are you able to) include time for things to overrun?