Protect Your Thinking Time

When I got made redundant from Amazon after nearly a decade, the first thing that hit me wasn’t panic. It was quiet. For years my calendar had been solid blocks of back-to-back meetings — program reviews, team huddles, one-to-ones, engagement sessions. Suddenly all of that was gone, and in the space it left behind, I noticed something odd. I actually had room to think.

That surprised me more than it should have. I’d spent nine years managing learning and development programs, running a customer service team, working on employee engagement — important work, genuinely — but somewhere along the way, “busy” had quietly become my stand-in for “productive.” My days were completely full. My actual thinking time was close to zero.

I don’t think I’m unusual in that. I’ve noticed it with almost every business owner I’ve worked with since starting YVO. The calendar is packed. Every hour has a name on it. And there’s a particular kind of comfort in that — a full schedule feels like proof you’re doing the work. It’s much harder to sit with an unstructured hour and actually think through a problem than it is to sit in a meeting about it.

I’ll be honest — some of that packed-calendar habit was avoidance dressed up as diligence. A meeting about a problem feels like progress. It has an agenda, a start time, a room (or a Zoom link). Actually thinking through the problem — turning it over, testing your assumptions, working out what you’d do differently — has none of that structure. It’s uncomfortable in a way that a meeting isn’t. So the meeting wins, most of the time, even when it shouldn’t.

Running YVO on my own has changed how I think about this. There’s no one else to sit in a meeting for me, and there’s no one else to do the thinking either. If I don’t protect an hour to actually think about a client’s operations, or my own, it doesn’t happen — it gets swallowed by the next task on the list. So I block it. Same as I’d block time for a client call. I treat it as a commitment, not a nice-to-have.

It’s a small thing. But it’s made a real difference in how clearly I can see what’s actually going on in a business — mine or theirs — rather than just reacting to whatever’s loudest that day.

Your turn: when did you last have real, uninterrupted time to think — and what’s been taking that space instead?