Leaders are rewarded for action. But the most important decisions often come from knowing when to stop moving and think.
There is a reason that this topic resonates with me. When I’ve had the chance to step back from the day-to-day, it changes how I see where my time actually goes.
The Cost of Constant Motion
Modern leadership culture treats busyness as a virtue. Your calendar is packed, you’re responding to messages within minutes, you’re always available. The implicit message is that if you’re not moving, you’re falling behind.
But constant motion has a cost. You lose the ability to anticipate because you’re too busy reacting. You stop noticing patterns because there’s no time to reflect on them. Original thinking requires quiet, and there isn’t any.
The result is organizations that execute efficiently on the wrong things. Fast, but not going anywhere worth going.
Where Good Ideas Actually Come From
Research on creativity consistently finds that insights don’t arrive during intense focus. They show up during breaks. In the shower. On a walk. During a commute where you’re not listening to anything.
The problem is that in an always-on world, those moments barely exist anymore. Netflix fills the evening. Spotify fills the commute. Phone feeds and algorithms fill every gap in between. Our brains never get the unstructured time they need to make connections.
Leaders who protect time for reflection make better strategic decisions. Not because they’re smarter, but because they’ve given their thinking room to develop.
Building the Pause Into Planning
Annual planning is where most organizations could benefit from slowing down. The typical approach is to pack the leadership team into a room, review last year’s numbers, set next year’s targets, and call it strategy.
Our organization uses the EOS framework, and the quarterly and annual planning rhythms it creates are only as good as the thinking that goes into them. A better approach starts with space. Before diving into tactics, create room for bigger questions:
- What assumptions are we making that might be wrong?
- What would we do differently if we were starting from scratch?
- What are we avoiding talking about?
These questions don’t have quick answers. They require sitting with discomfort, which is exactly why most planning sessions skip them.
Practical Tactics
A few things that have helped me:
Get devices out of the room during strategic discussions. Not minimized, not on silent. Physically elsewhere. The temptation to check something “quickly” fragments attention in ways that kill deeper thinking.
Start meetings with silence. Five to ten minutes, no agenda, no prompts. Let people’s minds settle before jumping into discussion. It feels awkward the first time. The quality of conversation that follows makes it worth it.
Block time for thinking. Not “available if needed” time. Actually defended time with no purpose other than reflection. I aim for two hours a week minimum, though I don’t always hit it.
I have found that walking meetings for discussions that need creative thinking rather than decisions work well. Movement helps cognition, and getting out of the conference room changes the dynamic.
The Discipline of Not Reacting
Pausing doesn’t come naturally to most leaders. The instinct is to respond, to fix, to act. Sitting with a problem feels like wasted time.
But not every problem needs an immediate response. Some need time to clarify. Some resolve themselves. Some reveal their real nature only after the initial urgency fades.
The discipline is recognizing which situations need action now and which need reflection first. Most leaders err toward action. Counterbalancing that bias takes conscious effort, and I’m still working on it.
Creating Space for Your Team
Your own reflection time matters, but so does your team’s. If you’re constantly pulling people into reactive mode, their strategic thinking suffers too.
Look at your organization’s calendar. How much time is spent in meetings versus doing work versus thinking? Most organizations are meeting-heavy and thinking-light. That ratio shapes what’s possible.
The goal isn’t to eliminate action. It’s to create enough space that when you do act, you’re acting on something worth acting on.