A bucket of gravel does not make a boulder.
And yet, consider how many leaders spend their days: back-to-back meetings, two-line email replies, quick notes on a presentation or report. It’s all understandable—the organization’s engine is humming, employees need decisions, and a leader’s job is, among other things, to stay in touch broadly across a team or organization. It’s no wonder leaders often feel that they succeed based on their ability to task-switch as much as their ability to set a vision and galvanize a team.
Or more simply: Your calendar is probably packed. If there’s no time for lunch breaks, or even a bathroom break, there’s definitely no time for leisurely, expansive, deep thought. According to Dorie Clark in Harvard Business Review, 97 percent of leaders say long-term thinking is critical, and 96 percent of leaders say they don’t have time for it.
The reason frenzied executive calendars continue to exist for so many executives is that, in the short term, it is a functional way to get things done. Peers, teams and clients want discussions, an answer, an approval. That’s what they need to do their jobs. What we sometimes forget as leaders, amidst all the organizational bustle, is that it’s our job to tend to the visionary, strategic questions before they become threatening, existential questions. When we operate only in a place of stimulus-response, we’re actually playing out of position—like a goalie who’s left the goal. This might work for a while, but when a competitor shoots and scores because we weren’t protecting what was most important—our ability to think broadly, creatively, strategically—we lose.
Deep thought is important because as leaders we’re not usually measured by the quantity of our output. We’re measured by the quality of our thought. A brilliant vision. A unique understanding. A counter-intuitive strategy. A prescient decision. These are things that drive careers and businesses. No one was ever promoted for their email response time. Warren Buffett knew this and once said, “I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business.”
Deep thought is also important because it’s a beautiful way to spend our time! Warren Buffett ended the quote above not by saying, “I [sit and think] because it drives shareholder value.” He ended it with, “I do it because I like this kind of life.” It can be incredibly nourishing and invigorating to be lost in thought; to find a state of “flow” in which we’re so immersed in our thoughts that everything else seems to slip away.
Unfortunately, deep thought, as you likely know, is not easy to protect. And women managers often face the additional, biased expectation of being “a pleasure to work with”—available and attentive to others’ needs. It’s completely understandable why a female leader would be more inclined to return the email quickly, bolstering her reputation for being responsive, even when her time is better spent thinking deeply. It’s not an unbiased world. And yet we can still find ways to thrive within it.
Here are four things you can do in the next week to start protecting your time to think:
- Block and defend the time. Block your calendar for at least two hours. If you need, call it something formal like “Strategy and Planning”. If you can, block what I call a “Do Nothing Day” (or hours), when you commit to producing nothing and instead set your mind to expansive brainstorming or deep consideration of challenges ahead. Now the blocking part is easy—it’s the defending part that’s hard. I have two words for you here, which you can repeat as many times as needed: Still No. Should you shorten your time so you can take that other meeting? No. Maybe by just a little? Still no. Move it to next week? Still no. You deserve this time to think. So does your career. So does your team.
- Revere your brain. If you work for your brain, your brain will work for you. Sometimes finding your way to deep thought is just a matter of blocking hours. But you’ve likely experienced that writer’s block feeling of finally arriving to that time, except your brain did not arrive with you. Consider: What places allow you to focus? What do you need to have off your plate? Does music help? What about how you’re sitting or what you’re wearing? Do you prefer having fodder around like research and examples? Or does a blank sheet of paper feel more invitational? Do you want to talk things out with others or muse on your own? Do you think best when you move? Perhaps a walk is in order.
- Leave the time unstructured. There are reasons why people so often get ideas in the shower. You’re unreachable. There’s no agenda. Your body is busy getting clean so your mind can wander. When our brains are in threat detection mode—return the email, fix the error, make the call before it’s too late—we are focused on reducing the noise around us. But imagination, foresight, and sharp strategic thought all require creating noise—dreaming up counterfactuals, letting 73 bad ideas flush from our brains before the brilliant number 74 comes. Unstructured time allows for that noise creation. In the words of Georgia O’Keeffe, “To see takes time.”
- Enjoy! In this harried world you have given yourself the gift of space. You’ve honored what your brain needs to do its best work for you. You’ve prioritized the brilliant thinking you’re capable of—the thinking that will propel your career and your organization. Not every deep thought block will yield a masterpiece, but with consistency, one will. And in the meantime, hopefully you’re having fun. Our lives are short and our careers are shorter—engaging in deep thought is a beautiful use of both.
By: Bree Groff is a workplace culture expert and author of Today Was Fun: A Book About Work (Seriously). She has spent her career guiding executives at companies such as Microsoft, Pfizer, Calvin Klein, Google, Atlassian, Target, and Hilton through periods of complex change. She is a Senior Advisor to the global transformation consultancy SYPartners and previously served as the CEO of NOBL Collective. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and holds an MS in Learning and Organizational Change from Northwestern University. Bree lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.
(Guest Contribution: The opinions and views of guest contributions are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com).
