And the reason is fascinating:

If you’ve ever planned a complex project, like a large-scale event, you’ve probably added “just in case” time to the project. So does every person you ask for a time estimate at task level, just to make sure there is that extra wiggle room for the unexpected. It seems logical, right? But here’s the problem: most of that time buffer gets wasted. Why? Because human nature works against us.

Summary:

1. Don’t add a buffer to each task. Instead, centralize all your buffers and hand them out only when needed after a quick investigation to help you improve (an antifragile pattern).
2. Buffers get wasted because people start tasks only when the deadline approaches (Student Syndrome), fill the time with unimportant details (Parkinson’s Law), or become overwhelmed by multitasking due to overlapping timelines.
3. For events, it’s even worse: our schedules are inherently multi-dimensional. The same Time-Place information need to be presented differently to each stakeholder (staff, services, guests). Generic tools break this link, and we wonder why event organizers feel they need to clone themselves 5 times to survive a big event. 😅

Why Your Buffers Keep Failing

When you add buffers at task level, most of the time, you’re just setting yourself up for inefficiency. Eliyahu Goldratt identified three reasons why in his book Critical Chain:

1️⃣ The Student Syndrome This is the classic case of procrastination. When people know they have extra time to complete a task, they tend to start later—often waiting until the very last minute.

2️⃣ Parkinson’s Law “Work expands to fill the time available.” Even when someone finishes a task early, they’re unlikely to say so. Instead, they’ll polish unnecessarily or hold onto it “just in case” something comes up.

3️⃣ Multitasking Madness When each task has its own buffer, multiple tasks often overlap. People end up juggling too many things at once, leading to perpetual multitasking. This slows down productivity and introduces mistakes.

These three effects work together to devour your carefully planned buffers, leaving you scrambling to meet deadlines when something unexpected happens.

The Antifragile Lesson

Centralizing buffers isn’t just robust—it’s antifragile. It allows your team to grow stronger from the challenges and surprises of each task of the project, not just each project.

💡 Discovering the Truth: Centralized buffers act like holding back floodwaters, revealing the boulders (underlying issues) that block production flow. Each buffer request becomes an opportunity to surface and address upstream inefficiencies. Imagine the incredible increase in throughput you can achieve—not year by year, but task by task.

💡 Clearer Oversight: A shared buffer encourages open conversations about progress, objectives, and risks. It’s a chance to repeatedly synchronize and ensure everyone is “rowing in the same direction.”

💡 Trust is Everything: Most people have had the experience that their time estimate got converted into hard deadlines they had to defend and got punished for if “missed.” You will not be able to remove task-level buffers if you don’t have the trust of your team that things work differently now. Until everybody in the whole organization are aligned and act accordingly, this won’t work. Task level buffers will creep into the system the moment people experience that their estimates turned into deadlines and their request for buffer consumption turned into a misplaced accountability conversation.

I would even say that buffer-free tasks are not possible until you’ve demonstrated safety a few times. This is the real reason why this simple concept is so difficult to implement.

Task-level buffers create a false sense of independence.

Especially for events, when each task is given its own buffer, it creates a false sense of independence between tasks, even though they’re interconnected. Task-level buffers often “hide” the need for real-time communication between stakeholders about their progress and delays.

• The iron team finished setting up the stage early, but the audio-visual team wasn’t notified in time, leaving their resources idle.
• Conversely, if the iron team is delayed, the audio-visual team may show up and wait unnecessarily.

What makes MergeLabs special as an event solution is that it maintains the linkage to each time-place information no matter in what schedule it is placed and how it is represented to adapt to each role (staff, services, guest etc). The schedule becomes an organic living system that allows changes to ripple across the system with the right people being communicated immediately to avoid wasting buffers.

This understanding came out of our two decades of experience organizing events using calendars, spreadsheets, and generic task mgmt solutions that were not built to maintain time-place information across multiple schedules and tasks. As a result, as an organizer, we felt like we needed to clone ourselves 5 times to survive the intense coordination ordeal.

If you’re curious, I’d love to send you a 6-minute personalized demo to show how it works.

The Takeaway

Work with your team to remove buffers from individual tasks and place them at the project level. For event professionals, consider moving away from generic scheduling tools and adopt solutions designed for the organic nature of events. I’d be delighted to explore if we can help you, but either way, I have this question for you:

Yes or No to centralized buffers?