The Luxury of Time
We've lost something really important—time to think
Like many leaders, I spend my days in meetings. Lots of meetings—like 8-12 a day, on average. 🫣
I color code my calendar, so I know exactly where I’m spending my time: customer conversations, candidate interviews, product planning, leadership meetings, team one-on-ones.
In most of these cases, the meeting is the work. As leaders, we often orchestrate and execute through others and meetings are an important part of that. I’ve even written about this before: Meetings vs “Real” Work.
But as is so often the case, two conflicting things can be true at the same time.
Because we also lose something important when we spend our days moving from meeting to meeting. It’s not the minutiae work: time to answer emails, respond to Slack messages, or prepare the next Board deck.
It’s time itself—for thinking, reflection, and learning.
This sort of time feels like a luxury. Blocking your calendar for XX hours per day or week to just … think? Clearly you don’t have enough to do. 🙄
Where leadership happens
The problem is, this unstructured time is where the hard work of leadership actually happens.
Without time, we cannot deeply understand our customers and their needs, or our industry and the ways it’s evolving. We don’t have time to think about how these impact our product, our messaging, our approach.
We cannot craft our strategy—or truly assess the impact of one we already have. We cannot experiment with new technologies. We cannot innovate.
Case in point: I work for an AI company. Although I use AI daily, I still haven’t meaningfully integrated it into my own work processes. Not because I don’t want to or don’t believe it can add value, but because I don’t have time to play with it. Try and fail, and try again.
We all need more (unstructured) time
My colleague Jill Leafstedt recently posted about the new type of role needed in an AI world. I agree with her assessment, including the need for dedicated time to learn:
“Also, learning cannot be an afterthought. This person needs time and a real mandate to stay current, not a conference once a year, but continuous engagement with how AI and adjacent tools are actually evolving.”
I would argue this has always been needed for roles at every level, but is now more important than ever—especially for leaders.
But somewhere along the way we over-indexed on productivity to the detriment of everything else. Every available minute gets filled, leaving little room for learning, reflection, or experimentation.
We can change that. We must change that—because if we spend all of our time in meetings, we eventually lose the ability to see what’s coming next.
Now’s the moment to take back what we’ve lost.
We tell ourselves that unstructured time is a luxury—but the truth is, it’s essential to lead.
Cover photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash
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