Wasting time? Diagnose yourself
Diagnose time poverty with a practical leadership checklist that helps you decide what not to do and refocus on what truly matters....
Leadership
Stop and think: How to lead decisively when time feels scarce
Leaders must make more time for thinking, so they can act with clarity under pressure, say Timothy Quigley and Nele Dael.
Rapid read:
- Decisive leadership under pressure depends on thinking, preparation, and practice undertaken before a crisis.
- Protect thinking time through deliberate breaks and recovery, effective delegation, and declining requests that compete with existing priorities.
- Set boundaries in advance, including limits on digital attention, to preserve the capacity to think clearly when pressure rises.
We hear the same concern from almost every executive we speak to in our programs and research: the future is less clear and the pace has picked up. Accenture’s latest (July 2026) survey of 3,000 C-suite leaders worldwide found that 73% anticipate a surge in inflation and 70% expect a reduction in global economic growth. The World Economic Forum’s 2026 Global Risks Report survey of more than 1,300 global leaders and experts reveals a strikingly pessimistic outlook: 50% anticipate a turbulent or stormy global environment over the next two years. As one board member shared, “Every executive I know feels overwhelmed trying to make sense of the world but feels they have to move with increasing speed just to keep up.”
But what if moving faster wasn’t the answer? What if the urge to “keep up” was making it harder for leaders to perform at their best and make better calls under pressure? In 1907, American historian Henry Adams argued that the pace of change back then threatened to outpace humanity’s ability to adapt. But, crucially, he also observed: “Thus far, since five or ten thousand years, the mind had successfully reacted, and nothing yet proved that it would fail to react – but it would need to jump.” It seems like every generation can be guilty of feeling like their era is more fraught than the last.
Why does it feel so challenging to respond well in moments of pressure? How can leaders manage those moments more effectively? The answer might feel counterintuitive: we have to slow down to think more, not less.
Why pressure hurts and practice helps
Research on how executive job demands shape strategic decisions (Ganster, 2005; Hambrick et al., 2005) explains why, under pressure, our attention narrows and deliberation gives way to fast heuristic processing and intuitive judgments. The search for understanding or insight falls victim to the feeling of being rushed and the urge to clear the ever-growing to-do list. The issue is not a lack of willpower: acute stress, such as time pressure, has been shown to impair working memory and the cognitive flexibility that make deliberate, comprehensive thinking possible in the first place. Instead, we reach for the familiar or obvious move and call it decisiveness. What feels like rising to the moment is, more often, the moment dictating terms to us. This natural reflex treats thinking and acting as rivals for the same scarce minutes: any time given to thought is time stolen from doing. This is misleading.
In fact, the thinking that matters most happens long before the moment of decision. If a leader has not put aside regular time for thinking, reflection, or preparation as a continuous practice, a crisis or pressure point, where time for thinking is scarce, will reveal flaws in their capacity to make effective decisions when it counts.
When US Airways 1549 lost both engines to a flock of geese a couple of minutes after takeoff in 2009, Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger and copilot Jeffrey Skiles had almost no time to deliberate. Less than four minutes after the catastrophic bird strike, they had successfully ditched the plane in the Hudson River and saved 155 lives. Far from a stroke of luck or uncalculated gamble, that decision to head for the water was the result of thousands of hours of flying, scenario preparation, and training.
Pilots train over and over again to follow a process, evaluate options, pick a workable one, and look for upgrades. Without that investment over the years, Sully’s response would have likely turned out very differently. As it was, he was able to assess his options rapidly. Early on, he said he might target the Hudson, even though it was far from an ideal option. He also weighed returning to LaGuardia airport or heading for two alternative airports across the river in New Jersey. He rightly determined all were out of reach. Less than 100 meters above the river, just 20 seconds before impact, the audio shows him still sifting for options as he calmly asked his copilot, “Got any ideas?” The nonchalant response? “Actually not.” Seconds later, they were in the water.
Surgeons, emergency service professionals, elite military units, athletes, and others in high-pressure situations are able to move quickly and decisively in the moment because of the hard work they have done up front. Business leaders operating in what feels like a fraught environment should learn from this.
Effective decisiveness under pressure draws on protected thinking time (it might be called practice, scenario planning, or something else). It does not compete with it. Doing the preparation is like creating a reservoir of capacity awaiting the high-pressure moments for use. Put nothing into filling that reservoir, and you will have far less to draw on when a critical moment arises.
How boundaries helped Lloyds CEO
AntĂłnio Horta-OsĂłrio took over Lloyds Banking Group in March 2011 facing multiple challenges: the bank was part-owned by the British government after a ÂŁ20 billion bailout, and a scandal was growing over payment protection insurance inappropriately sold to customers. Horta-OsĂłrio later admitted he was sleeping two or three hours a night at most.
Eight months into the job, on the advice of his doctor, he began a nine-day stay at a clinic for his insomnia. He stayed away from the bank for about two months. During his absence, Lloyds installed its finance director as interim chief executive, named a second contingency interim in case he did not return, and watched its shares fall to a two-and-a-half-year low.
Asked afterward what had gone wrong, he said that, with hindsight, he had overdone it and that he “focused too much on too many details.” Before resuming office, management reporting lines were adjusted to counter his micromanaging tendency. He set strict boundaries he kept throughout his tenure: no email or calls between 7pm and 7am. He went on to lead Lloyds for a decade, returning it to profit and to freedom from the government’s stake in 2017.
Horta-OsĂłrio recovered, but it took substantial changes to protect his calendar from his own worst impulses.
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Active recovery often slips down the priority list when work gets heavy – just when we need it most.
Three ways to protect time for thinking
From our executive teaching and research experience, we have identified three ways to help you protect time for thinking in a busy world:
Build supply: Make the time to think deliberately rather than hoping for an opportunity among “the leftovers.” This time must be budgeted in advance and protected like any other commitment, not as more hours to grind at the problem, but as incubation time, a deliberate step away from problems where solutions can surface. It might feel like an indulgence you can’t afford until you notice that your best ideas almost never arrive at the desk under pressure of a deadline. Often they appear on a hike, while watching a film, or after laughing and playing with your family. They show up in the gaps between work.
A meta-analysis published in Psychological Bulletin found that setting a task aside improves problem-solving performance in divergent thinking tasks, with the largest gain when the break is filled with something non-demanding rather than taxing (Sio and Ormerod, 2009). Sleep also helps in processing insight: after learning a task, participants who had eight hours of nocturnal sleep were more than twice as likely as those who remained awake to grasp a hidden rule because the sleeping brain restructures fresh memories.
It pops up in your personal time as well as “active recovery”: the weekly golf game with a group of friends that always ends with the group “solving all the world’s problems” over a post-match drink; a run, hike, bike ride, yoga, arts and crafts, or cultural event. The common denominator for these activities is the positive and energizing state they bring, which broadens the momentary thought-action repertoire, promoting discovery of novel ideas and actions.
Unfortunately, active recovery often slips down the priority list when work gets heavy – just when we need it most. Psychologists call this the recovery paradox: when job stressors are high, workers are less likely to engage in recovery activities, which only heightens the underlying stress.
Delegate: Everyone endorses delegation, but few do it well because the hard part runs counter to our instincts. Much of the work we seek out or that flows to us is the things we are good at. But this can be a trap that allows another slice of your week to go to something well below your unique or peak capabilities. Delegating effectively means giving up things we do well, perhaps better than anyone else, not merely offloading what we cannot do. What should remain is the smaller set of work where our position, authority, and experience combine to make our time worth more there than anywhere else. Everything else should be delegated. If this gives you a twinge of guilt, remember that delegation provides an opportunity for personal growth in others.
This trap runs across organizations: the same reliably competent people keep getting asked for help, driving exhaustion, with the damage often landing hardest on the most senior, most tenured people – the ones an organization can least afford to lose. Left unmanaged, poor delegation isn’t a personal productivity problem. It is how organizations unknowingly drain the talent they depend on most, one reasonable-sounding request at a time.
Almost every demand on your time is judged in isolation, where it often passes the test.
Say no more often: Junk is easy to refuse. The difficulty is the reasonable request. Almost every demand on your time is judged in isolation, where it often passes the test. Would this call be useful? Yes. Is this a sensible event to speak at? Of course. The right test is not whether something is worthwhile on its own, but whether it survives against the portfolio of what you have already chosen to do and the space you are trying to protect. This is the pursuit of less: deliberately declining opportunities that don’t clear a high enough bar.
Particularly difficult requests are the flattering, plausible invitations, each defensible on its own while the sum is a calendar driven by the priorities of others. You would catch this instantly in a strategic review of someone else’s calendar, but it’s often missed with your own. Rules can help: set budgets on your commitments by category, such as speaking engagements, conferences, special task forces, or helping a charity. Setting a limit of five speaking engagements a year makes it easier to consider a new request against the portfolio rather than evaluating each request in isolation.
One area needs a bespoke defense: our digital attention. The endless feed, the bottomless scroll, can absorb more of our time than it is worth. What’s the harm of just one more peek at your inbox while at dinner with friends? The only defense is structural. You decide once, in advance, what the budget is and what the boundaries are. It is the cockpit principle again. What protects you is the work that happens before the moment, not in the moment.
Protect your time, proactively
The line between professional and personal time can blur. The pressure to keep up is not going to subside. What leaders can do is decide, in advance, what time to protect for thinking, and stick to it. Then, when a crisis inevitably hits or the pressure rises, you will have a reservoir to draw on to think more clearly and act decisively.
Wasting time? Diagnose yourself
A few simple questions can help you determine if you are letting others manage your time.
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