The greatest challenge isn’t finding more time — it’s becoming more aware of how you’re choosing to spend the time you already have.
There are moments in life that quietly change the way you think. Not because something dramatic happened. But because you suddenly realise you’ve been telling yourself a story that was never true.
One of those moments happened to me about ten years ago. I booked four consecutive weeks of annual leave. That might not sound particularly remarkable.
For me, it was.
It was the first time in fifteen years since co-founding 3Q Recruitment that I had taken more than two and a half weeks away from the business. As I packed my suitcase, I felt excitement, but also something else. Sadness, not because I was leaving, but because I realised how many years had passed believing I couldn’t.
For fifteen years I had accepted a story that many founders know only too well.
“The business needs me.”
“I can’t be away for that long.”
“Everything will stop.”
The truth? I had never stopped long enough to ask a better question.
“How could I make this happen without hurting the business?”
Instead, I’d accepted my first answer as fact. Looking back now, I smile because, had I become seriously ill, I wouldn’t have had a choice. The business would have continued. My incredible team and managers would have stepped up.
The evidence had always been there. I simply hadn’t given myself permission to see it.
That holiday changed more than my relationship with annual leave. It changed my relationship with time.
Today, taking one, two or even four consecutive weeks away no longer feels impossible. It feels intentional. It allows me to travel, renovate properties, spend time with people I love and return with fresh energy and perspective.
Ironically, stepping away has made me a better leader, not a less committed one.
We Don’t Have a Time Management Problem
We Have a Time Awareness Problem – that’s my take on it.
Over the years I’ve invested in time management courses for myself and my team. Like many leaders, I’ve explored different systems, planners and productivity tools. Some have stayed with me.
Stephen Covey‘s Time Management Matrix continues to influence how I prioritise my workload. When everything starts to feel urgent, I still find myself separating what is truly important from what is simply demanding my attention.
Every quarter I also carry out a simple exercise. I call it:
Do it. Delegate it. Dump it.
It creates immediate clarity. Some tasks need my attention, some belong to someone else, some don’t need doing at all, and those simple disciplines still serve me well.
But recently I attended an online BBC course inspired by Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, and it made me pause in a way no productivity system ever had. (It was shared with me by my incredible virtual assistant; she was helping me to look at my diary differently.)
Not because it taught me how to manage my diary. Because it challenged the assumption that managing time was ever the real problem.
One idea stayed with me long after the course had finished.
You will never reach the point where everything important is done.
At first, that sounds unsettling. As entrepreneurs, we’re wired to believe that if we could just get through this project, finish this quarter… respond to every email… clear the to-do list… AND THEN life would somehow become calmer.
But it never does.
Another opportunity appears, another challenge arrives, another email lands. The work doesn’t end, but life isn’t waiting on the other side of your to-do list. Life is happening while you’re working through it, and that single idea made me realise something.
Perhaps the goal isn’t better time management. Perhaps it’s better time awareness.
The Lie That Keeps Us Feeling Behind
One of the most common phrases I hear in business is: “Do more with less.”
I’ve never liked it, not because we shouldn’t improve efficiency, but because somewhere along the way we’ve confused efficiency with impact and worth.
We’ve started believing that our value is measured by how much we can squeeze into every hour. We praise or celebrate being busy, apologise for resting, quietly compete over who is most exhausted and muse on, ‘Am I the only one who feels permanently behind?’
We convince ourselves that if we could just become better at time management, everything would feel easier. But, in my humble opinion, perhaps that’s the wrong question.
Maybe the issue isn’t our ability to manage time. Maybe it’s the unrealistic expectations we’ve accepted about what can fit inside it.
Our calendars become overfilled.
Our ambitions become oversized.
Our days become scheduled down to the minute.
And somewhere between the meetings, the emails, the family commitments, the exercise we promised ourselves we’d do and the endless notifications on our phones…
Life starts to feel like something we’re surviving rather than living.
We talk endlessly about the importance of work and rest. But what happened to play? To curiosity? To wandering without purpose? To reading because we enjoy it. Travelling because we’re fascinated. Laughing without checking the time.
Those moments aren’t distractions from life.
They are life.
Time Is an Investment, Not an Expense
One of the biggest shifts in my own thinking has been recognising that not every hour carries the same value.
Like many business owners, I used to believe I should become competent at everything. If I worked harder, learnt more, fixed every weakness, up-skilled and up-skilled again, eventually I’d become the leader my business needed.
Then I came across an idea that completely changed my perspective.
If we spend our lives trying to improve our weaknesses, we often make only marginal gains.
But when we recognise our strengths and invest more of our time there—while seeking support for the areas that drain us—we create far greater value.
That doesn’t mean avoiding difficult things. It means becoming intentional.
Sometimes paying an expert isn’t an expense, it’s an investment. If someone can complete in one hour what takes me an entire day, I’ve not only bought expertise, I’ve bought back time.
Time I can reinvest where I create the greatest value:
Time developing the leaders in my company.
Time with clients.
Time writing.
Time with my family and friends.
Time simply living.
The cheapest option isn’t always the wisest.
Sometimes the greatest return on investment isn’t financial at all. It’s how you choose to spend the hours you’ve been given.
Better Problems, Better Choices
I was recently speaking with the founder of a growing not-for-profit organisation. She was excitedly sharing her plans for expansion and all the opportunities that lay ahead.
I smiled because someone had once shared a piece of wisdom with me that I’ve never forgotten.
“Your problems don’t disappear as your organisation grows. The quality of your problems changes.”
I’ve found the same to be true of time – successful people don’t suddenly discover extra hours in the day. The demands placed on them don’t disappear. The diary doesn’t magically become empty. But the difference is that they become increasingly intentional about where they invest their time.
They stop asking, “How can I fit more in?” and begin asking, “What deserves my time?”
That question has quietly become one of the most important leadership questions I ask myself.
Because time is the one investment we’ll never get back.
Better Questions Lead to Better Time
Last month I wrote about the importance of asking better questions. This month I’ve realised that one question has quietly become the most important one I ask myself.
“What deserves my time?”
Not because I’ve finally mastered time management. Far from it.
Like many entrepreneurs, there are still weeks when I underestimate how long something will take, overestimate how much I can achieve and finish the week wondering where the time disappeared.
I don’t think I’m alone.
Most of us aren’t struggling because we lack another productivity system. We’re struggling because we’re trying to fit an unrealistic amount of life into a finite amount of time.
Somewhere along the way we’ve accepted the idea that if we just became better organised, more disciplined or more efficient, we’d finally feel on top of everything.
I’m no longer convinced that’s true.
Perhaps we’re not failing at time management; we’ve simply lost awareness of time itself.
The Big Stones Come First
Many years ago I watched a short video that has stayed with me ever since. Perhaps you’ve seen it too.
A lecturer places large stones into a glass jar. Then smaller pebbles. Then sand. Finally, water. Each fills the gaps left by the one before.
The message is simple.
If you don’t put the big stones in first, they’ll never fit.
I’ve always loved that analogy. But over the years I’ve realised there’s another lesson hidden inside it… the jar still has limits.
No matter how skilfully we arrange the contents, it doesn’t become bigger.
And neither does our day.
Sometimes we spend so much energy trying to squeeze more into the jar that we forget to ask whether everything inside it deserves to be there in the first place.
Life isn’t meant to feel like an endless game of Tetris, yet for many people it does.
We race from one commitment to another. Our phones never stop buzzing: emails, meeting reminders, WhatsApp Groups that you can’t remember why you got into, and even the ‘off’ part of our day has become a never-ending ‘to-do list’.
No wonder so many people describe themselves as exhausted.
Not because they’re lazy, but because they’ve been living as though every empty space in the jar needs to be filled or it’s a fail on ‘maximising life’.
We Need Space to Think
Technology has transformed the way we live and work. It has also transformed our expectations.
We’re available almost all the time. Someone can reach us wherever we are. The line between work and home has become increasingly blurred.
The irony is that we’re more connected than ever and yet many people feel they have less uninterrupted time than at any point in their lives.
I’ve become increasingly aware of the importance of creating digital health as deliberately as I create physical health.
That doesn’t mean rejecting technology. I love what it enables.
But I do believe we all need moments when we’re unavailable.
Moments when our attention belongs to the people sitting in front of us rather than the notifications arriving on a screen.
Moments when our minds have room to wander.
To think.
To dream.
To simply be.
Some of my clearest thinking has never happened sitting at my desk.
It has happened walking.
Travelling.
Reading.
Looking out of an aeroplane window.
Having coffee with someone whose conversation makes me think differently.
Those moments rarely appear on a productivity report.
Yet they’ve often created my biggest breakthroughs.
Success Doesn’t Give You More Time
One conversation recently reminded me of this beautifully.
I was speaking with the founder of a growing not-for-profit organisation. She was sharing exciting plans for expansion and all the opportunities ahead.
It reminded me of a piece of wisdom someone once shared with me.
“Your problems don’t disappear when your organisation grows. The quality of your problems changes.”
I’ve found exactly the same to be true of time. Success doesn’t create more hours!
Growth doesn’t magically simplify your diary.
Leadership doesn’t remove difficult decisions.
It simply changes the nature of them.
The question isn’t whether life becomes easier.
The question is whether we become wiser about what deserves our attention.
That’s a very different way of measuring success.
What Are You Really Investing In?
As business owners we think carefully before investing money. We analyse risk, consider the returns, ask whether something aligns with our long-term goals, and it’s still new to me to apply the same discipline to our time.
We say yes before we’ve considered the cost, accept meetings we don’t need to attend, carry responsibilities that someone else is ready to own, spend hours trying to become marginally better at something that simply isn’t one of our strengths.
Sometimes the greatest investment we can make isn’t learning another skill. It’s recognising where our strengths create the greatest value and allowing others to contribute theirs.
That’s not weakness to me, it’s real leadership.
Every hour you spend doing something someone else could do is an hour you’re not investing in the work only you can do.
Time isn’t simply about productivity; it’s about purpose.
A Different Measure of Success
For years I measured success by how much I achieved: projects completed, satisfied clients, supported and funded CSR projects, growth in brand and market share, increased output, problems I solved.
Thankfully, today my definition of success has changed and expanded.
Success is creating a business that doesn’t depend on me being involved in everything.
Success is taking four weeks away and knowing my team will thrive.
Success is having time to travel, to write, to dance, to mentor, to enjoy a long conversation without constantly checking my phone, to spend time with family and friends without feeling guilty about what I should be doing instead.
Because those moments aren’t distractions from success – they are my successes.
Closing Reflection
There is one question I’ve been carrying with me since reflecting on time more intentionally.
I’d like to leave it with you.
Are you investing your time in the life you genuinely want to create… or are you simply reacting to the expectations that society, work—or even you yourself—have placed upon you?
There is a difference.
- One life is intentional. The other is reactive.
- One creates memories. The other creates endless to-do lists.
- One leaves room for play, curiosity, relationships and joy. The other leaves us permanently feeling as though we’re running behind.
Maybe it’s time to stop chasing the next best thing.
Maybe it’s time to stop believing that better time management will somehow create more hours.
Maybe it’s time to say no a little more often…
…so you can say yes to free time.
- Yes to being fully present.
- Yes to the people who matter most.
- Yes to a life that doesn’t leave you feeling permanently behind time, but instead allows you to be fully present in your own life and to enjoy the time you’ve been given.
Because this isn’t a rehearsal. It’s our one and only run at this extraordinary game of life.
Time is the only resource every entrepreneur receives equally.
The difference isn’t how much we have. It’s what we choose to invest it in.
Resources That Have Shaped My Thinking
If this article has encouraged you to think differently about your relationship with time, these are resources I’d recommend exploring:
- Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals – Oliver Burkeman
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Stephen R. Covey (particularly the Time Management Matrix)
- The “Big Rocks” demonstration by Dr. Stephen Covey, illustrating the importance of prioritising what matters most.
- The Game of Life and How to Play It – Florence Scovel Shinn
- The Alchemist – Paolo Coelho
👠 Put Your Courage Shoes On
This month’s Courage Shoes challenge isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing less—with greater intention.
Take twenty minutes this week and look honestly at your calendar.
Ask yourself three questions:
- What are the big stones in my life that deserve to go in first?
- What am I saying yes to that no longer deserves my time?
- What one thing could I stop, delegate or postpone that would create more space for living, not just working?
Then do something that many of us struggle to give ourselves permission to do.
Block out time for something that has no commercial return.
Time to read, walk, play, to love and be loved, to enjoy your life.
Protect that appointment as fiercely as you would a meeting with your biggest client.
Because one day you won’t remember every email you answered or every task you crossed off your list.
You’ll remember the conversations, the adventures, the laughter and the quiet moments that reminded you why you worked so hard in the first place.
This month, put on your Courage Shoes.
Not to run faster.
But to walk more intentionally.
Because the life you’re building deserves your time as much as the business you’re growing.
