6 August 2026 · Practice notes

The cost of a gap

An unbooked hour is not free time, and gaps do not arrive evenly.

An empty slot in the middle of the afternoon looks like a small loss and a chance to catch up. It is worth being precise about what it actually is, because the intuition is usually wrong in both directions.

The cost is not only the work that was not done. The practice is open, the lights are on, the desk is staffed, and none of that scales down for an hour. A slot that goes unbooked carries the full running cost of the practice for its length and returns nothing against it. That is why an empty diary hurts a small practice disproportionately: its costs are almost entirely fixed.

In the other direction, an unplanned gap is genuinely useful in a way a planned one is not, because it arrives when the day is already running and the backlog is visible. A practice with a standing list of work that can be done in twenty-minute fragments converts gaps into filing, chasing and refilling. A practice without one converts them into conversation.

The more interesting property of gaps is that they cluster. They arrive on the same weekday, in the same part of the day, and after the same kinds of cancellation. This is not bad luck. It is the schedule and the booking rules producing the same result repeatedly, because they are the same schedule and rules every week.

Which means gaps are addressable. A recurring Tuesday afternoon hole is not an argument for advertising; it is an argument for looking at what is bookable on a Tuesday afternoon and by whom. The general remedy — get more people through the door — is the expensive answer to a question that usually has a cheap one.

The practice worth adopting is to write down when the gap happened rather than only that it did. A month of that is enough to see the cluster, and seeing the cluster is most of the work.