At the top of my daily note, there are five little checkboxes. Shop. Bonsai. Exercise. Reading. Meditation. They aren’t on the calendar. They have no time blocks assigned. They just sit there.

For a while, I thought of them as “non-negotiables”. Every box had to get checked every day. That was the deal I made with myself. But it started to feel like a burden, and I kind of lost the thread. I love all five of them.

The shift happened gradually. I started thinking of them less as obligations and more as escape valves. When I finish a hard chunk of writing, or a run of support emails, or a meeting that took more out of me than it should have, I look at the boxes. I pick one. I go.

Shop time means out in my garage-turned-maker space, planing a board or cutting a joint. Bonsai means out on the patio, caring for a tree. Exercise could be a walk, a ride, or a Pilates session (I do A LOT of those). Reading means a good book, often something from the Greek philosophers, but also sometimes just a good story. Meditation is 30 minutes on the mat. Different activities. Same function.

Most days, I hit at least three. Some days I hit all five. But I don’t expect to hit all five, which makes it better when I do.

The variety matters more than I realized at first. If my brain is cooked from three hours of writing, I don’t always want to sit quietly with a book. I recharge better working with my hands. If I’m physically tired but mentally wound up, a few rounds of bonsai work do more for me than exercise. The five options let me pick the one that fits the kind of tired I’m actually feeling.

Time blocking gets a bad reputation because it can sound like programming yourself. You miss a block, and suddenly you’re behind on a system you made for yourself. I get it.

Escape valves change that feeling. This isn’t just taking a break. A break is passive — you stop and wait.

An escape valve is active. You’re going somewhere with intention, doing something that requires your hands or your attention in a completely different direction. My day still has structure and intention, but when I finish a hard piece of work, I’m not immediately locked into the next hard piece of work. I can look at the boxes and give myself permission to go somewhere else for a bit. The day doesn’t get looser. It just gets more human.

And the transition back in is usually where my best work happens. I spent an hour in the shop today, right before sitting down to write this newsletter. And I think it is pretty good. That hour wasn’t wasted. It made the work better.

If time blocking keeps feeling like a straitjacket, maybe the fix isn’t to abandon it. Maybe it just needs some escape valves.