Slowing Down to Speed Up - Part 2: How to Build These Strategies into Your Work & Life
In Part 1 we made the case that pausing sharpens decisions rather than slowing them down. The harder question is the practical one: where does reflection fit when your calendar is already full? The reassuring answer is that it doesn't need a retreat or a free afternoon, it needs a habit.
You don't need six hours. You need one minute, or thirty, on a calendar you actually protect.
Start small and make it real. Block thinking time and defend it the way you'd defend a client meeting. Keep a simple journal, not just what happened, but how it felt and set aside an hour a week to review it. The trick is not to re-read those notes but to add to them.
If an hour still feels impossible, you're in good company. After interviewing more than 100 managers across 15 countries, Joseph Badaracco found that busy, successful people rarely reflect in long, uninterrupted blocks. Instead they fit small pieces of thinking into the cracks of an ordinary day. Aim for good enough. Look at hard problems from more than one angle. And check a decision against your own standards before you commit to it.
Two habits are worth stealing outright: a quarterly step-back to ask what went well, what didn't, and what you'd repeat and the one-minute PAUSE for when a decision feels most urgent. Stop, notice how you feel, breathe in, breathe out. Or, as Danny Penman puts it, when in doubt, breathe out.
Pick one and start there. The organisations that move fastest in the long run aren't the ones that never stop, they're the ones led by people who know when to.
