Charmain Bogue | What I Tell Clients Who Say They Do Not Have Time to Think

Charmain Bogue with coworkers

Protected thinking time is not a luxury. It is the work.

The most common thing I hear from executives in their first coaching session is some version of the same sentence: I know what I need to do, I just cannot find the time to do it. The calendar is full. The inbox is full. The meetings end and more meetings appear. The thinking keeps getting deferred to a future week that never arrives.

I used to spend the first part of those conversations trying to help people find the time. I have stopped doing that. The time does not get found. It has to be taken.

The category error most leaders make

The problem is a classification error. Most executives treat thinking as something that happens in the leftover space, the thirty minutes between calls, the flight they hope goes long, the weekend morning before the family wakes up. They schedule the work that produces visible output and leave the work that produces judgment to chance.

But judgment is the job. A senior leader who does not have protected time to think about where the organization is going, whether the strategy is working, and what needs to change is a leader who is executing a plan that nobody is updating. The deliverable of executive thinking is not a memo. It is the quality of every decision that follows. Treating it as optional is not just inefficient. It is a quiet form of negligence toward the people depending on those decisions.

What I do with my own calendar

I block two hours every week that are not meetings, not email, not reading. No agenda. The only rule is that I have to be thinking about something that matters and is not urgent. I did not start doing this naturally. I had to build it the same way I ask clients to build it: by treating it as an appointment with someone who cannot be cancelled on.

The first few weeks it felt uncomfortable. I was trained, like most people who rise in organizations, to associate productivity with visible activity. Two hours in a chair with no output feels wasteful to the part of the brain that has been rewarded for deliverables. That instinct is worth resisting.

How to actually protect the time

The practical version is not complicated. Block it on the calendar before anyone else can. Name it something that communicates seriousness to anyone who might try to schedule over it. Tell the people around you that it exists and why. Then show up to it with the same consistency you would give a board meeting, because the thinking you do there is what makes the board meeting worth having.

When clients complain that they cannot make this work, I ask one question: what would it cost you to keep operating at the pace you are operating, without ever taking the time to look up and ask whether the direction is right? The answer usually ends the debate.

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