How to stop firefighting at work and create more time

The more you make time to think strategically, the less firefighting you'll have to do.

Yet as humans, doing this instead of jumping straight into a task can feel really hard.

That's because the emotional part of your brain - the amygdala - is focused only on your short-term 'survival' and always reacts first when it feels threatened.

So it - and hence you - spend the day firefighting perceived dangers: responding quickly to emails, jumping into 'urgent' meetings, on and off the phone. Quickly trying to 'fix' problems.

Even though most of these situations are so rarely as urgent as your amygdala makes you believe.

The result? The important strategic work is left undone, or until 8pm in the evening when you're so tired from firefighting all day.

Creating strategic thinking time changes this.

It allows you space to problem solve upstream of any problems.

Meaning: you spend time understanding why certain problems have occurred, anticipating any that might come up and then putting plans in place to stop them happening.

Making space for strategic thinking time is one of the core concepts we teach our clients.

We call it “Focus Time” and they learn it when mastering our Hour One time-planning framework. 

And soon our clients create time up to two hours of Focus Time, every working day.

During that time they’re not in meetings. They have no distractions. They’re fully focused - tapping into their highest level thinking ability.

They’re using their brain's prefrontal cortex to plan and problem solve, instead of just reacting when hijacked by the amygdala.

And soon they have less urgent or unexpected “problems” to solve - because they’ve already anticipated what they could be and mitigated or planned for them.

And they learn to leave “urgent things” for a few hours, then often realise that others figured them out by themselves, or they weren’t really that urgent after all.

As they practice Focus Time, they’re building new lifelong skills along the way, too.

Like self-discipline, which takes practice at first, because all they want is another cup of coffee or to check their phone or emails. 

And self-awareness - to watch how their mind is working in real-time and notice if how they’re thinking is helpful to what they want to get done, or not. 

They learn the skill of thinking before doing, instead of just doing. 

So their days become more calm and focused. They feel more grounded, able to think more clearly, so make better decisions.

They no longer feel like they want to just press pause and have time to think. They get that time - every single day.

And more time focusing on what’s important is more time making impact.

With coaching, you’ll learn exactly how to do this and make space for it. 

It all starts with making the decision to be open to doing things differently.

You can decide that 2023 is going to be different.

That you're going to become the leader you want to be - calm and focused for you and your team, not rushing from one thing to the next.

Then schedule in focus time for tomorrow.

Give yourself the space you need to think clearly - and see how it changes everything.