Hey it's Buono. This connects to the 50% rule I talked about yesterday, but today I want to zoom in on something more specific: the importance of leaving blank space in your daily life.
I'm not perfect at this. Not even close. But since I started intentionally protecting empty time, I've noticed three things that simply wouldn't have happened without it.
If you're a business person buried in work 24/7 or a content creator grinding for impressions every single day — both of which used to be me — this might hit differently.
1. You Can Jump on Trends Before Anyone Else
Have you noticed how many new AI tools are dropping right now? New models, new image generators, new everything — at a pace nobody can keep up with. And most of them are genuinely game-changing.
Has there ever been a year this wild? Maybe when web services were exploding 10+ years ago, but even then, only a handful had real impact. Now it feels like every week something massive drops.
Am I keeping up with all of it? Absolutely not. But because I have empty space in my schedule, when something hits and I think "I need to try this" — I can act immediately.
Case in point: when Google dropped Imagen 4 around June this year, the AI-generated photos looked impossibly real. I had a gut feeling this was a step-change moment. So I started experimenting.
Got obsessed with eliminating the "AI look." Bought courses, tried hundreds of iterations, burned through every technique I could find. (Ended up using Imagen 3 for Asian faces because the consistency was actually better.)
Then I made a TikTok account to test public reaction. It blew up. First time I ever broke 1 million impressions. Hit 10k followers in under a month.
None of that happens if my calendar is packed. The experimentation alone took massive amounts of unstructured time. Being early, going deep, and iterating obsessively — all of it requires blank space.
2. Your Weekends Actually Become Weekends
Old me: weekends were just extensions of the workweek. Always thinking about Monday's tasks, always planning the next social media post, always "on."
When my first kid was born, I was like this. I'd take him to the playground but have earbuds in, consuming content the whole time. I wasn't really there. And that's something I genuinely regret.
So when my second kid came along, I made a decision: I'm going to actually play. Fully present. No distractions.
But to do that, I had to work backwards. If I wanted an empty head on weekends, I needed to eliminate the things that fill it. Less responsibility at work. Fewer tasks. Less social media pressure. Smaller scope everywhere.
Gradually, it worked. The mental noise on weekends got quieter.
Recently my wife told me something that caught me off guard. She said: "You look like you're genuinely having fun when you play with the kids. How do you do that?" Dead serious face.
I didn't think I was doing anything special. But compared to the guilt-ridden, half-present version of me with my first kid? I guess something changed.
I want to keep this up while they're still young. It matters more than anything else on my to-do list.
3. You Find Your Impulse
This is the biggest one for me.
There's a book called "How to Find the Impulse to Leave the Rails of Life." It's become my recent bible. I lose my sense of purpose and direction more often than I'd like to admit, and this book pulled me back.
The core argument is simple:
- Impulse is the driving force of your life
- To feel that impulse, you need blank space — you need to turn yourself into a receptive medium
"Receptive medium" really stuck with me. You can't pick up on subtle signals if you're drowning in noise.
This also connects to "Every Day Is a Good Day" — a book I read during paternity leave about finding beauty in small, ordinary moments. Different frame, same underlying truth: you have to be open and empty enough to notice what's right in front of you.
Having blank space doesn't mean something magical happens every day. But it makes you available for when it does. And it reframes impulse as something positive rather than reckless — which is how most people see it.
Watching my kids helped me understand this. They run purely on impulse. That's why they can play until they literally collapse. No strategy, no calculation. Just raw "I want to do THIS" energy.
There's a manga I love called "Chi." The main character Rafal becomes consumed by heliocentrism in a way that looks completely irrational to everyone around him. The book argues that's pure impulse in action.
That kind of moment — where something grabs you like a ghost possessing your body — I'm still waiting for mine. But I know it won't find me if every second of my day is already claimed.
Keep some space open.
Catch you later ✌️
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