The Power of The Pause
My colleague Renee uses a phrase I’ve come to value: peace in the pause. It reminds me that in the rush of professional life, deliberately stepping back—even briefly—can change the quality of our thinking.
I’m fortunate that focused vacations give me space to reset. But peace doesn’t only come in weeks away. It can be found in the ten-minute breaks between calls, the walk around the block, or even the courage to put the phone face down and sit quietly. Research backs this up: Stanford studies show that creative output can increase by up to 60% after a short walk. And microbreaks as brief as 5–10 minutes improve focus and reduce fatigue, according to the American Psychological Association.
Free Time Isn’t The Goal: Your Clarity Is
Technology has always promised us more: more efficiency, more productivity, more free time. But we often squander that “extra” capacity. Instead of slowing down, we fill the calendar with more meetings, more errands, more consumption. The question is not whether AI will create more free time—it will. The question is: what will we do with it?
Gary Vaynerchuk famously tries to keep meetings under seven minutes. I admire the discipline, but I’ve learned I’m not wired to sprint through back-to-back-to-back meetings. Time is our scarcest resource. If AI can protect some of it, we need to decide if we’ll invest it in noise—or in clarity.
Coach Dan Sullivan often asks clients how long they expect to live. After a few rounds of challenging their assumptions, he can usually convince them they might live years—sometimes decades—longer than they thought. The next question he poses is: what will you do with that time?
The same question applies on a smaller scale. What will you do with the hours AI gives back to you this week? Will you simply cram in more tasks—or will you think differently about how you invest those hours?
Protect Your White Space
A few years ago, I began tracking my energy levels and noticed a pattern: if my calendar was wall-to-wall, my best thinking never had room to surface. Now I schedule deliberate buffer time—not just open slots, but protected blocks where I won’t accept meetings. For some, leaving a little white space between events is enough. For me, actually forcing it into the calendar creates freedom: the freedom to absorb and process, to handle the inevitable flexibilities of a day, or to entertain a new opportunity I couldn’t have anticipated.
If you’re scheduled from top to bottom, still answering email before dawn and after dark, you may be leaving no room to think—or to notice the opportunity that’s just around the corner.
I was recently forced into this experiment. My iPhone went in for service at the Apple store, and I was told to wait an hour. No podcasts, no news, no music. Just me at a Starbucks with my thoughts. At first it felt uncomfortable, almost like a test. Then I realized: this was a pause I never would have chosen, but one that proved valuable.
There’s a related idea called dating yourself—single people going to a restaurant or café alone, not to prove anything, but to practice comfort in their own company.
The lesson is universal.
Getting comfortable with your own thoughts, without constant inputs, can be liberating. It’s in those moments that perspective sharpens.
So when AI or automation hands you back some minutes—or when life unexpectedly takes your phone away—what will you do with the gift? Schedule another meeting? Run another errand? Or pause long enough to reclaim a bit of peace, and perhaps a clearer sense of how you’ll use not just this week, but the years ahead?
