I will never forget the days when best practices productivity told us to plan every minute of our days for maximum effectiveness. The primary discipline then was stick with the plan and make sure you got everything done. Today, I block at least 20% of my day as open for new inputs that I know are going to blow up my best planning for the day. This HBR post helps take the guilt away:
“Most people I know have a to-do list so long that it’s not clear that there’s an end to it. Some tasks, even quite important ones, linger unfinished for a long time, and it’s easy to start feeling guilty or ashamed about what you have not yet completed.
People experience guilt and its close cousin shame when they have done something wrong. Guilt is focused internally on the behavior someone has committed, while shame tends to involve feeling like you are a bad person, particularly in the context of bad behaviors that have become public knowledge.”