The hour that felt wasted may have contained a conversation you will remember longest.

Value gets judged too early and by the wrong measure. An hour with nothing achieved in it looks like a loss on the evening’s accounting, while being exactly the shape of hour in which a real conversation can happen, because nothing was scheduled to interrupt it. Directed time is efficient at what it was pointed at and closes off everything else. Some things only occur in the unpointed hours.

Leave one stretch this week genuinely unplanned and resist auditing it afterwards. Stay at the table once the meal is finished. If nothing comes of it, that is the ordinary price of the arrangement working sometimes.