Studies show that people serve themselves in proportion to the size plate that they have been given. As a result, a person tends to over serve on larger plates. So, use a smaller plate and there’s less space to fill, and less food will be consumed.

Increasing lanes on the highway does not decrease traffic. The answer as to why is found in “the fundamental law of road congestion: new roads create new drivers, resulting in the intensity of traffic staying the same. If you expand people’s ability to travel, they will do it more. Making driving easier means that people take more trips in the car than they otherwise would.

The cable news station has twenty-four hours of airtime to fill, but important stuff doesn’t happen every single hour of every single day which leaves cable news with the problem of filling all that air time. So what they came up with to fill all that air has been celebrity gossip, wild conjecture and sensationalized drivel.

It is well known that meetings kill productivity in the office. A common suggestion to improve productivity is to not schedule meetings to the default hour time length. Why? Allotting an entire hour for a meeting may lead your attendees to fill the entire time slot just for the sake of it.

You see where I’m going with this. Whether it’s over-consuming calories, unnecessary travel, useless information or wasted time, there is a problem with assigning time/space first and needs second. Turn that around and analyze what the need is first and then assign the correct amount of time and you will end up with no filler needed.

One of the biggest offenders of the time/need scenario is the modern-day office. I am convinced that there is no place on earth that creates more useless filler than the office. Because the employee is required to be in their seat for 40 hours a week, work is created to fill the time that does little to nothing to move the ball down the field. Our culture of busyness does nothing but reinforce the problem. Being busy equals being productive which equals being a good employee. No one wants to look like they don’t have enough to do so productivity theater ensues.

Carefully consider looking at your behavior through the lens of filler/not filler and reduce the filler. Be careful to accurately align your time spent with the time the thing deserves.