Chaos Buffers: Planning Around Users Who Don't Owe You Time
Every plan carries a backup and a scope-sized buffer, because your users' real job always wins
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
In an environment where external events routinely detonate the schedule, Gautam builds explicit buffers and backup plans into every plan, sized to the scope of the work rather than a fixed percentage. The founding premise is a mindset shift: your users are there for you to serve, not the other way round, so their emergencies legitimately outrank your calendar. The counterintuitive second half is that when a buffer is not consumed, you must collapse it immediately and move on, rather than letting the plan expand to fill it.
Origin
Developed by Upasna Gautam at CNN Digital, where editorial users can be pulled away by breaking news at any moment and onboarding cycles span global time zones.
Core principles
- 01Our customers are not here to serve our needs — they have a whole other job
- 02Buffer size scales with scope, not with a fixed rule of thumb
- 03A buffer is worthless without a concrete backup plan for the session it protects
- 04If the buffer is not needed, close it immediately — do not let work expand into it
- 05Assume the interruption is routine, not exceptional
How to run it
- 1
Accept the asymmetry
Internalize that your stakeholders serve customers of their own. When their crisis hits, your session, sprint or launch is the thing that yields. Plan from that assumption instead of resenting it.
- 2
Size the buffer to the scope
Judge each phase on its own. Some buffers are a day or two; some are a week or a month. Longer, higher-coordination cycles (training, testing, feedback, onboarding) get materially bigger buffers.
Pro tip State the buffer explicitly in the plan so the cycle looks 'longer than it needs to be' on purpose, not by accident.
Watch out A generic 'add 20 percent' rule fails here — the variance is driven by coordination cost, not effort estimate error.
- 3
Write the backup plan before the session
For every high-coordination event, decide in advance what you will do with the time and what alternative path gets you the same information if the participants vanish.
Pro tip Ask: if these people disappear in the next five minutes, what is the second-best way to get this signal?
- 4
Collapse unused buffers immediately
When a phase you buffered for a week finishes in a day, do not coast. Assess the situation objectively, make the call, and move to the next phase at once.
Pro tip The quick decision to collapse a buffer is where you claw back the time the interruptions cost you.
Watch out Unclaimed buffer silently becomes slack; Parkinson's Law eats it if you do not act.
In the wild
Onboarding editorial teams onto the new CMS involves training, testing, dialogue, feedback, then testing again, then onboarding — across global time zones with users who can be pulled to breaking news at any moment. Gautam deliberately extends the cycle with buffers of a day, a week, or a month depending on scope.
→ The cycle takes longer than it 'needs to', but teams get onboarded without the schedule collapsing, and when a phase lands early the team compresses and moves straight to the next.
Common mistakes
Planning as though your calendar has claim on your users
Assuming a scheduled research session will happen produces repeated schedule failure and quiet resentment towards the people you exist to serve.
Applying one buffer rule to everything
Gautam explicitly refuses a rule of thumb — the buffer depends on the scope of the work. A fixed percentage over-pads short work and under-pads high-coordination phases.
Is it for you?
Best for
PMs and program leads whose stakeholders are frontline operators with unpredictable, higher-priority duties
Not ideal for
Teams with dedicated, dependable participants where over-buffering just slows delivery
From the transcript
“since our editors and our journalists our customers we're there to serve their needs but they are not here to serve our needs they have…”
“sometimes that buffer is a day or two and sometimes it's a week or a month and sometimes when we think we need a buffer…”
“it depends on the scope of the work we're doing at that time”
From the episode
An inside look at how CNN builds product
Upasna Gautam