Space and Time to think

No, wait. Stop. I’m serious.

When was the last time you genuinely gave yourself space and time to think about where your business is going, and what you want from it?

Not while answering emails or driving to your next meeting. Not in the 20 minutes you managed to grab between everything else. I mean properly stopping and thinking.

Where are we going? What needs to change to get us there?

It sounds clichéd, but there’s a simple reason most of us don’t do this enough: we’re so busy.

Operations. Finance. Marketing. Sales. People. Customers. Quite rightly, they all need our attention. The danger is that we become so busy running the business we have today that we don’t spend enough time thinking about the business we want tomorrow.

When Monday morning arrives

We have strategy days and leadership meetings. We talk about our ambitions, agree priorities and leave feeling energised.

Then Monday morning arrives.

The day-to-day takes over. Gradually, those good intentions slip down the list and the strategy document ends up in a drawer. Sound familiar?

The challenge is turning that thinking into something we actually do.

A three-to-five-year ambition needs to become a tangible 12-month outcome. That outcome needs clear 90-day priorities, with actions, owners and measures. Then we need to come back to them regularly: What did we say we would do? What happened? What’s getting in the way? What do we do next?

Simple questions. Not always easy answers.

Thinking is an investment

We often treat time to think as a luxury, something we’ll do when this project is finished or things calm down. Except there’s always another busy period.

Making time to consider where you want to go and how you’ll get there is an investment in your business.

That thinking may lead you to question something familiar, make a decision you’ve been putting off or stop doing something altogether. Growth can be uncomfortable. Knowing that is one thing; acting on it is another.

The value of someone alongside you

This is where accountability matters. Someone who remembers the plans when the day-to-day starts shouting louder. Someone who asks what happened to that 90-day priority and occasionally asks the question you’d probably rather they didn’t!

Of course, letting somebody into your business isn’t always easy. Will they understand how you work? Can you be open about the things that aren’t going well? Can you trust them?

Over 29 years of working alongside businesses, including my years in banking, I’ve been trusted with conversations that go well beyond the numbers. Ambitions, difficult decisions, worries that don’t always get said aloud.

Those conversations continue today. One thing they’ve taught me is that when you’re invited into someone’s business, listening comes first. You have to understand what matters to them before you can ask the questions that might help them move forward.

That trust is a privilege. It grows through what you do with that understanding over time.

Sometimes an outside perspective creates room for a conversation that’s hard to have when everyone is caught up in the day-to-day. It helps you return to the things you said mattered and turn good intentions into progress.

It starts with space to think. Then getting clear about what matters, breaking it into achievable steps, taking action and coming back to it.

We all want our businesses, teams and ourselves to grow. Wanting it is a starting point. Making room for it and following through takes commitment.

So here’s my question for you this month:

Are you genuinely making time to work on where you’re going - or are you simply too busy running where you are?