The discomfort of high-leverage time

It’s easy to decry how difficult it is to set aside time to do strategic thinking–there’s an endless queue of tasks, priorities, interruptions, and heads-down time itself is needed for a lot of valuable work, adding to the contention.

And that’s why we don’t get to it. Right?

But what about when you do, indeed, have a solid block of an hour or two without interruption that you could potentially use to consider the bigger issues and decisions in your life and career?

Suddenly, mundane tasks become irresistible. Fixing documentation, polishing meeting agendas, or writing code suddenly seems much more important than they had been a few minutes back.

This isn’t about time management—it’s about resistance. Strategic thinking is uncomfortable because the stakes are high. Our subconscious knows this and pushes us to avoid it.

There’s lots of ways to cope with this. I personally find that changing my location with the explicit purpose of tackling high-leverage stuff helps; heading to a nearby coffee shop that I rarely visit for another reason builds up a nice association. Other tactics include scheduling the time, ritualizing an association (even with music or scent), giving yourself a prompt to start with, and so on.

But even more important than knowing what works is knowing what doesn’t: gritting your teeth, pretending it’s fine, and just forcing yourself through. Sometimes this works. But we are as a species so very good at resistance, and it’ll be even stronger the next time, so relying on this approach will swiftly fail.

The value of strategic, high-leverage time spent well is incalculable. But it’s not just about having the time; it’s about being able to use it. And the first step is to acknowledge that this is hard, so you can build the systems and habits to make it easy.