I’d love your thoughts on this. It’s a big one (for me).
One of the propositions I’m working on involves ‘creating space to think’ . I have had some interesting chats with businesses about this recently.
‘Businesses just can’t justify time out at the moment’ said one manager. I continued the conversation trying to share my experience, my acknowledgement of his perspective (that I might’ve felt the same many years ago). But now more than ever before people need space to think, and maybe even space to do nothing.
It’s part of recovery, recharging, productivity, creation, innovation.
Today I recorded a podcast with Simon Alexander Ong about his new book ‘Energise’. One of the things we talked about was how energy is as much about being still as it is about movement. One of his chapters is called ‘Manage your energy, not your time’. A brilliant challenge to us all about being intentional when it comes to where we put our energy, and planning time to think and time out. It was another penny drop moment for me to differentiate time to think, and time to do nothing. Two very different purposes.
Time to think is important. You can not not have time, you can not be too busy. It’s part of doing good work.
Time to think most certainly has a ROI with a more focused, less tired, more energised, less exhaustion result.
I’ll be doing more work on this, and developing more workshops about ‘How to think (rethink)’. It will certainly not be something you can’t justify.
Would love your thoughts - do you make time to think? What is the ROI for you?
eleanor
If I'm given a brief for some comms or user instructions I find it helps to just sit with it for a while, often without specific focus, to let it swirl about in my brain before something half sensible rises to the top
Thinking time .
The late great Norman Jepson an MD at Whitbread used to call it “foot on the ball” time. He used to encourage me to just get away from the day to day whirligig and just spend time
looking at the big picture.He was brilliant at stopping things being done that added no value or profit to the business. A precursor to “will it make the boat go faster?” mantras.