How much of your time in your calendar is dedicated to strategy and long-term planning? In one survey of 10,000 senior leaders, 97% said that being strategic was the most critical factor in their organization’s success – yet 96% said they lacked time for it. The irony is telling. Everybody agrees it matters; few make space for it.
Most leaders know they should be thinking more strategically. They believe it. They say it. And then they look up at the end of another packed week and realize it hasn't happened — again. Not because they're lazy or unambitious, but because strategic thinking doesn't announce itself with urgency. It waits. And in the absence of a deliberate decision to protect it, everything else wins.
The leaders who consistently operate at their most strategic level aren't doing so because they have fewer demands on their time. They've made a different decision about what gets protected.
Why Strategic Time Keeps Getting Crowded Out
1. Short-term focused as a default. Most leaders want to think strategically but stay trapped in the near term. Rich Horwath, CEO of the Strategic Thinking Institute, found that nearly all leaders feel “too busy putting out fires.” That means they never climb above the day-to-day chaos to reimagine the bigger system. Some leaders do not know how to step away from the whirlwind. One HR VP I worked with had spent two years optimizing her hiring process for speed. She was proud of her metrics. But the company had grown from 400 to 1200 people in that time, and the process she'd perfected was built for a different organization entirely. She'd been so deep in execution that she'd missed the strategic inflection point that required a fundamentally different approach. The problem wasn't effort. It was absence of strategic time.
2. Poor email management. The constant flood of emails keeps leaders trapped in the immediate and often distracted by the unimportant. According to a Radicati Group analysis, the average professional receives 126 emails per day, and some of the executives I coach receive more than 400 per day. If you were to categorize your messages, which ones truly create value, and which simply drain time and energy? How much time do you spend in your inbox versus how much you want to? How does this time investment serve your long-term goals? What’s your plan to free yourself from this time-consuming activity? Strategic leaders reclaim focus by creating boundaries — batch processing, designating “no-email hours,” or using their inbox as a decision tool, not a to-do list. No one is going to change your inbox for you; you have to change your relationship with it.
3. Failure to prioritize and delegate. When you create a jam-packed schedule and are running from meeting to meeting, you cannot contribute strategically without adequate time to reflect on the issues and consider all the options. What meetings do you need to deprioritize? How can you delegate so you do not have to be in all places at all times? Our routine can put a damper on strategy time. How can you reallocate your time to prioritize unfamiliar, non-routine activities and increase your capacity to act more strategically? In a ten-year longitudinal study of over 2,700 newly appointed executives, 67% of them said they struggled with letting go of work from previous roles. Trying to do everything yourself is a sure path to limiting your leadership and that of others because they do not have the chance to grow.
4. Falling into the competency trap. This is when you continue a previous task related to execution because you do it well, enjoy it, and gain confidence as you accumulate expertise in that one task. The problem is that while you are doing that work, you might be neglecting other activities, such as strategic planning and setting vision and direction, which are skills the business needs more. What produced your past successes will likely be different than the future wins you will need to succeed. Indeed, you can deliver amazing work on the wrong things, and it will go unnoticed. If you are in stage 3 of your leadership but still doing stage 2 work, it is time to step out of your comfort zone and build new strategic muscles.
How to Create Strategic Space:
Strategic thinking does not require a sabbatical or extensive leadership retreats – it requires space. Productivity expert David Allen shared in an interview with Dorie Clark for her book Stand Out, “You don’t need time to have a good idea, you need space – freeing your mind from the constant hum of tasks, emails, and notifications. If you’re trying to fit 110% of work into 100% of time, the math simply doesn’t work. You have to make room for thought, not just activity.
Create more white space and treat it as non-negotiable. Block thinking time on your calendar and guard it the way you'd guard a board presentation. Even 60 uninterrupted minutes per week — truly uninterrupted, phone away, email closed — can shift the quality of your strategic thinking meaningfully. The brain doesn't shift from reactive to reflective instantly; it needs runway. White space is that runway.
Toggle between heads-up and heads-down modes. Strategic leaders know the difference between heads-up time — scanning the environment, meeting people outside their immediate team, exploring adjacent ideas — and heads-down time, where they execute with focus and depth. Too much heads-up time and you risk being brilliant about a world that no longer exists. Too much heads-down and you risk executing flawlessly in the wrong direction, perfecting something the world no longer needs. The discipline is the toggle — and the awareness of which mode the current moment calls for.
Cultivate your “20% time.” Google famously gave employees 20% of their time for self-directed creative and strategic projects. 3M did the same with 15%. The results — Gmail, Post-it Notes, and dozens of other innovations — speak to the power of protected thinking time. The uncomfortable truth Google later discovered: fewer than 10% of employees actually used it. Not because it wasn't available, but because daily execution always feels more pressing than thinking - until the moment is too late to think clearly.
That dynamic doesn't only live at Google. It lives in your calendar right now. Strategic thinking rarely triggers the same alarm as an overdue deliverable or a backed-up inbox. It waits patiently while everything else cuts the line. And if you don't actively protect it, it never happens.
You don't need a company policy to change this. You need a personal one. Block the time. Name it. Treat it with the same non-negotiable seriousness you'd give your most important client meeting — because in many ways, it is. The client is your organization's future.
What percentage of your working time is currently protected for strategic and creative thinking? If you can't name the number, the answer is probably close to zero. And that's worth sitting with.
What To Do With Strategic Time Once You Have It
Once you find that calendar time, some executives may not know how to begin their strategic thinking time. I find that some of my clients put too much pressure on themselves, believing they must begin with states of enlightenment that yield novel insights, but it can start much smaller.
1. Distinguish the Urgent from the Important. Stephen Covey's 2x2 time management matrix remains one of the most useful tools in a leader's toolkit because it names the problem precisely. The highest-value work lives in the important-but-not-urgent quadrant: strategic planning, relationship-building, capability development, long-term thinking. And it's exactly where almost no time gets spent without deliberate protection, because nothing in that quadrant is screaming for your attention.
That's where your strategic time belongs. Where do you want to have an impact? What will it take to get there? What does success look like? How will the organization need to evolve to meet the challenges coming over the horizon? These are the questions that shape the future and only possible with long-term planning. These questions will always lose to the urgent unless you decide, in advance, that they won't.
2. Think with others to get an outside perspective. Reach out to other departments or build rapport with leaders, managers, front-line team members, and customers to listen and understand their roles, concerns, and ideas. This will add to your knowledge bank of all parts of the organization, enabling you to better utilize those insights in your projects and ensure alignment with the corporate strategy from the outset. You can also consider using other partners for new initiatives and creating win-win experiences. As you develop these relationships, you will learn more elements of the business and know which key individuals to call when you want to brainstorm or move past an obstacle. It would help if you were also proactive about connecting with peers outside your organization and in your industry to understand their observations. You can share your ideas with your network to foster greater meaning-making.
3. Expand your cross-functional learning. When you understand more about all areas of the organization and know who all the key players are, each project you work on becomes a puzzle. When you move pieces, you can see how they affect others, either directly or indirectly. When you consider the impacts of your decisions on all company domains, you see the big picture more clearly. That is a strategy.
4. Ask other strategic thinkers about their processes. Turn to people with skills you admire and learn about their process as a prime learning opportunity. You can start the conversation with, “I noticed you offer really valuable contributions in the meetings; I would love to know your process for strategic thinking? Where do you get your insights from?” You’ll be surprised by how quickly others engage and what you can discover.
5. Keep Learning. Read books and articles, listen to podcasts and interviews, and watch instructive videos and webinars to expand your thinking and learn new approaches relevant to your specific situation. Many valuable conversations are happening in your industry, especially among futurists who have spent much time thinking about these topics. How do you receive regular doses of information that can spark your own? Are there classes, industry conferences, professional gatherings, or associations that you can attend? Can you form a book group with your coworkers to have a dedicated space for this type of learning? It doesn’t need to be time-intensive; even just 10 minutes of reading and 30 minutes of discussion can yield significant returns.
6. Run small experiments. Is there one project you can work on regularly to develop some of your strategic skills? You can test a hypothesis and run an experiment, and once you take action, reflect on your progress and learnings, and then iterate to improve even more. If you just stay in your head without taking action, you will rob yourself of the best learnings, which usually come when you try something and get immediate feedback.
7. Engage in meaning-making activities. Developing great strategic thinking skills requires you to gain exposure to key roles, synthesize broad information, participate in a culture of curiosity, and gather experiences that allow you to identify patterns and connect the dots in novel ways. That’s why leadership development programs often include job rotations, cross-functional projects, and face time with senior leadership - they accelerate your critical thinking. You can take that 30-foot view to better understand those issues that get raised over and over in different parts of the organization. Why hasn’t anybody solved them yet? What’s been the dominant approach? What’s a different approach to take?
8. Take breaks to create breakthroughs. It can be common to think that to accomplish your work, you must increase your hours. In fact, research by Bob Sullivan reveals that productivity decreases for those who work more than 50 hours per week. When you can let your mind wander, you can come up with great strategic ideas. Lin Manuel Miranda came up with the idea for his award-winning play Hamilton when he was on vacation with his wife fishing. You can check out my other blog on the importance of taking breaks for breakthroughs.
9. Reflect regularly. Do you regularly ask, what’s working and what’s not? How can you chronicle your successes and failures to rethink your approach to make it even more strategic? You can develop a reflective practice that can be as little as one or five minutes that will engender tremendous value because you will be more intentional about your actions and contributions.
The Competitive Advantage Is Real
If 96% of senior leaders aren't making enough time for strategic thinking, then becoming one of the leaders who does is a genuine differentiator — not just for your career, but for your organization. The leaders who protect strategic time don't just think better. They make better decisions, develop stronger teams, and build organizations that are more resilient to the inevitable disruptions ahead.
No one is going to schedule your strategic thinking for you. That decision belongs to you — and so does the competitive advantage that comes from making it.
Powerful Quote: “Get off of the dance floor and look at your operation from the balcony.” - Ron Heifetz, Harvard Professor
Reflection Question: What is your thinking and reflecting practice? Comment and share with us, we would love to hear!
As a Leadership Coach, I partner with leaders to engage in strategic thinking for them and their teams, contact me to learn more.
The next blog in this series (4/4) will focus on how to develop strategic thinking skills.
How do you create space to strategize?