Doing things just in time has consequences. No wiggle room, no buffers. Sure, on-demand is great when you are watching Netflix, but is it great when working a corporate job?
Project managers have buffers built into their plans precisely for the same reasons just-in-time is risky. A day of delays can be costly. Yet most of us do things the costly, risky way. That's where the clichè saying "Failing to plan is planning to fail" comes from.
No buffer experience is "planning to fail". Deadline after deadline in the corporate world is a system seemingly designed to weed out the weak or otherwise unwilling to sacrifice large portion of their lives to them. It also stifles innovation and personal growth.
That last sentence is personal complaint and reason for this post. In the middle of the audit season I was just wondering, why haven't I read a book for a long time (no energy to read during weekends), when was the last time I learned something new (some tidbits on Saturday walks around with podcasts in my ears, but not many of them stuck) and how did I grow (maybe resenting the way audit works in waves, much better if it were more continuous).
This era is an age of continuous learning. It's so easy to read couple articles on topics, watch one or two videos on youtube and read a book. And I did feel quite emasculate by the fact I had no energy to do so.
So I bit the bug, so to speak, bought an e-book and read The 1-Page Marketing Plan. It's distant enough from my comfort zone to not be work. It has some interest to my career path (money and systems in companies and their vulnerability) and it was short enough to read. A chapter a day was manageable, even if it meant 15 minutes off the sleep. Not ideal, but definitely not bad.
The bufferless environment is going to bug me. There has to be a solution to absorb volatility in workload without sacrificing competitiveness. Maybe internal work, but that doesn't seem like reasonable assumption in accounting company.