Buffering… (part 2 - examples)

Just over a week ago, I wrote about buffering in the context of creating content ahead of time for this blog. Here are some ways I have been thinking about lately of how you can use the concept of a buffer in real life.

Emergency fund

It is common advice in the personal finance community to save up an emergency fund of 6 months or more of expenses. This way if you have an unexpected expense you will be ready. Instead of having to put it on your credit card, you can simply pay out of (and then replenish) your emergency fund.

This is perhaps even more important for artists and other creatives who are payed by the job, usually after the work has been done and often after a lot of investment of time and money into a project.

Driving

Leaving extra space between you and other drivers means that if your vehicle malfunctions or the driver in front of you does something unexpected, you will have more time to react. You won’t have to slam on your brakes. An added bonus is that leaving extra space allows you to use your accelerator and brakes less and will actually reduce your costs and slightly cut down your carbon footprint.

Supplies

Having enough of the supplies that you need to get your work done will mean that you are always able to work on your task when you have time. If you are a painter and every tenth time you go to paint you realize that you are running low on white paint, you will spend time you should have been painting making a run to the art supply store.

Not only that, but you will probably buy other things that aren’t so essential at the same time. You don’t need to have backups for your backups of every supply that you might one day use (this is a problem in its own right) but make sure you have plenty of what you actually need in stock. This is essentially the same concept as mise-en-place that I wrote about here.

If you have any good examples of how you use this concept in your life, let me know in the comments below.