"People are juggling priorities that shift by the hour and filling their days with decisions that drain more than they deliver. And after more than two decades working with leaders and teams on productivity and time management, I've seen the same pattern play out again and again. That of smart, capable people caught in a cycle of saying yes to everything. As a result, they leave little space for what really matters."
"If this sounds familiar to you, that's because most of us in the modern world have developed an unconscious reflex to keep saying yes to urgency, opportunity, and momentum. In doing so, we've trained ourselves to push forward without pause. We've also convinced ourselves that availability equals value and responsiveness equals worth. Our best thinking, most meaningful contributions, and clearest leadership rarely emerge from this state of constant forward motion. They emerge from space."
Workers face increasingly varied and complex tasks that fragment attention and reduce performance. Daily routines often include reactive interactions, urgent emails, family demands, and back-to-back meetings that leave little time for concentrated work. Chronic reflexive agreement to urgency and opportunity trains people to equate availability with value and responsiveness with worth. High-quality thinking, meaningful contributions, and clear leadership require deliberate space, which emerges when people deliberately pause and choose what merits their time, attention, and energy. Cognitive load research indicates working memory has limited capacity, so reducing unnecessary demands preserves focus for high-value tasks.
Read at Fast Company
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