How to find time to move your strategy forward
How to find time to move your strategy forward
A look at why strategic thinking can be elusive in modern organizations and four ideas for how to change that for your work.
Post Summary
This post will explain why leaders can’t find time to work on their strategy and why strategic thinking requires a different work environment.
Many organizations operate in a non-stop emergency mode full of meetings, emails and tasks.
All of this activity requires constant context switching, which may be fine for small tasks but it is disastrous for strategic thinking.
You’ll learn four ideas for how to take back control of your time: office hours, appointment blocks, fewer priorities and changing where strategy work happens.
Housekeeping
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Check out the first episode of Stratagems, my new podcast that deconstructs real-world strategies into actionable insights. I’m already working on episode two.
Be sure to check out the footnotes for further ideas and background information.
I. How much time do you spend thinking about your strategy?
This was the question I posed to a marketing executive recently. Her company was going through turmoil after the pandemic significantly affected their business for the worse. Her days were full of non-stop fires, all which had to be dealt with right away.
Her role was supposed to be mostly strategic but she was spending all of her time on the tactical. If she didn’t make significant changes soon, she would be forever stuck in firefighter mode. At least until she or her boss decided that she was no longer a good fit for the role.
Her situation is common. Many leaders feel they have no time to make progress on the exciting strategy1 that was recently formulated. Their existing commitments consume 120% of their time and they just can’t see any way to carve out more time.
Before we jump into tangible ideas for how to create more strategic time, let’s understand why strategic thinking is different from tactical thinking.
II. A different kind of thinking requires a different work environment
The modern work environment is hectic2. You’re jumping on virtual or in-person meetings throughout the day while trying to respond to the non-stop barrage of emails or direct messages. In the few breaks you might get, you try to make progress on your own tasks. By the time you get home, you’re mentally exhausted and ready to watch Netflix.
This kind of work environment is full of context switching3. Every time we switch context—into a new meeting, a new email, a new task—our brain dumps the current context and loads a new one. It takes the brain a few minutes to go through this process while consuming part of our mental energy. If you count all the emails, calls, meetings, and tasks that you engage in daily, you will end up with hundreds of context switches.
Constantly switching contexts is not the issue here4. Most leaders are very good at this rapid thinking and they are able to sustain a high pace for a long time. Many leaders even boast of their ability to make lots of decisions quickly. They may be perpetually close to burn out but there’s a certain enjoyment from doing stuff.
The problem is that strategic thinking requires a completely different mindset5.
When you think about strategy, you need to slow down and ponder on the possibilities.
A strategic goal may be to increase revenue but you shouldn’t jump into solutions right away. Exploring the different possibilities (more customers, higher prices, more products), thinking of potential issues (capacity issues, customer pushback, product complexity), holding conflicting ideas in your head (decrease prices to increase revenue in the aggregate) and then making a decision is going to lead to better results.
If you’re switching contexts every 60 seconds, you will never go deep enough. You may solve a lot of minor issues and even make many decisions but they pale in importance to the strategic ones.
Let’s now look at how we can create the space needed for strategic thinking.
III. Making space to move strategy forward
I’m not here to change the entire culture of your organization and kill all the context switching. Let’s focus instead on the actions you could take to create more space for the strategic thinking that can make a serious impact on your work.
The first idea is to introduce the concept of office hours. You likely attended office hours back when you were in college so you’re familiar with the basic concept. You can establish set times, e.g. 2 pm - 4 pm, when people can drop in with questions. The goal here is to take all the ad-hoc questions that come your way and condense them into a specific block of time without forcing you to switch contexts throughout the entire day. If you’re worried about the urgency of questions, try it and see what happens. You might be surprised.
The second idea is to allow individuals to book time with you. You can use online appointment tools built into popular calendars such as Outlook or Google Calendar. People may require more than a few minutes of your time and this allows them to book a longer period, e.g. 30 minutes. Just like the first idea, you can then establish rules on when these meetings will take place e.g. only on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
The third idea is to work on fewer things. If your to-do list has 10 items, you’re bound to feel pressured to work through them quickly. If you only have three items, you can spend a couple hours on each one. Cal Newport’s book, Slow Productivity, dives deeper into this idea.
The fourth idea is to change your environment6. Your current work setup—your office, your home desk—may not be suited for deep thinking. You may have negative associations due to your existing workload. Create another space that is only used for strategic thinking. You may even find an outdoor space that relaxes you, such as going for a walk in the forest with a notebook.
The goal is not to spend all of your time thinking about strategy. Instead, set realistic goals such as finding two hours to work on strategy away from your desk7. You can then raise that over time until you find your sweet spot.
If you don’t create the space for strategy, it will never occur. You may not be able to change your entire organization but you can take back control of some of your time with any of these fourth ideas. Once you see the value of having dedicated time for strategic thinking, you won’t ever go back.
-Ruben
If the word strategy feels too abstract, this article by Jim Semick gives some examples on how people have turned strategic thinking into tangible agendas that can drive value over time.
The coining of the phrase “productivity tax” is fantastic and sets the tone for how context switching derails your strategic thinking.
Alicia Raeburn, from Asana, has a great article diving deeper into the concept of context switching.
If you do feel context switching is an issue for you, this article contains several options for how to structure your days and tasks to reduce the mental load.
I love the diagrams in this article to show how context switching kills strategic thinking.
John Hall makes a similar argument for a “quite space” where strategic thinking can take place. The importance of location can make a major difference to building a strategic thinking habit.
Mike Howard has great examples of how he carved out time for strategic thinking at his roles in Microsoft and the CIA. Well worth the read if you want to dive deeper into this topic. Ruchi Watson has another article that helped shape my thinking