Kiyotaka Serizawa’s colleagues were “amazed how much he worked” at his job managing janitors who did maintenance for apartment buildings in the town of Kashiwa, Japan.¹ He frequently put in more than ninety hours a week and got so little sleep that his mother said he might stop at her house for a nap during his drive between offices. “He would lie here on this couch,” she said, “and go into such a deep sleep that I would come and check on him to make sure his heart was still beating.”² The toll on him was such that he tried to resign from his job, but his manager would not accept the resignation, and Serizawa continued to work for the company because he didn’t want to create a problem for his subordinates.³

Matsuri Takahashi found herself in a similar position at her job in digital advertising in Tokyo. She worked so many hours without time off that she frequently ended up sleeping only two hours a night, all the while not reporting much of her overtime.⁴

Unfortunately, the toll eventually became too much for Serizawa and Takahashi, and they both committed suicide.

The Japanese even have a word for dying from working too much—karoshi. In 2015 the government certified 189 people as having died from karoshi, although experts believe that the true number may be in the thousands.⁵

The good news is that in most cases, working too long or without thinking doesn’t have fatal consequences. The bad news is that an action bias, whereby we think we need to be always on, seriously hampers our learning.

Recharging and Reflection by Jay Dvivedi at Shinsei Bank

The Long Term Credit Bank of Japan was established in 1952 to fund the country’s rebuilding of basic industries. In 1998 the LTCB collapsed with almost $40 billion in nonperforming loans. The government was forced to nationalize the bank to avoid financial catastrophe. The bank’s fundamental position in the Japanese establishment made the collapse shocking, and things grew even more so when, in 2000, the government sold the bank to a US private equity firm that renamed it Shinsei—“new birth” in Japanese.⁶

The new CEO, Masamato Yashiro, set out on a bold reorganization plan. At its center was an effort to build a retail presence for the bank, essentially from scratch. That would require an entirely new IT infrastructure. Fortunately for Yashiro-san, he had a leader who he knew was up to the task. Upon taking the job, he had sought out his former chief information officer from Citibank Japan, Dhananjaya “Jay” Dvivedi. Dvivedi’s mandate was straightforward: revolutionize Shinsei’s IT systems, but do it fast and cheap. Dvivedi did just that. He replaced the company’s costly mainframes with a server-based platform, saving $40 million in the process. He built a new ATM network with low-cost technology—for example, using multiple internet connections for redundancy rather than a much more expensive dedicated line.

This allowed Shinsei to be the first bank in Japan to offer no-fee, twenty-four-hour ATMs. Dvivedi also developed systems and processes that permitted the bank to move profitably into consumer lending. In the end, he accomplished the required transformation in one year for $55 million—10 percent of the typical time and 25 percent of the typical cost.

To most leaders, his task would have appeared impossible. But Dvivedi was a consummate learner. He believed that the answer to any problem could be learned if he focused on understanding the core principles. He identified the key challenge and created standard processes that were elegant in their simplicity.

But Dvivedi was possessed of more than the right mindset and a focus on process. He was also contemplative. He recognized that if he was exhausted, he would be unable to understand his situation and learn. As a result, he practiced meditation and took short walks outside his office, enabling him to concentrate on his challenges. He said, “I’d learned through my career that the work was never ending. There was always another task that needed my attention. I needed to take a break and meditate or go for a walk, and then, with my head clear and my body refreshed, I could actually get more done.”

Dvivedi engaged in reflection each day. He kept a learning journal in which he worked through his daily thoughts. He held short huddles with his team to discuss not only the day’s activities but also the key challenges each member faced so that they could discuss and reflect together. He said, “When I came up against a problem where I didn’t know what to do, I tried to take time to step back and think. And then if I was still stuck, I’d leave it and come back to it later. This usually did the trick.” Dvivedi’s approach to learning highlights the fact that effective learning requires contemplation.

Why Does Contemplation Lead to Learning?

Contemplation provides two things: reflection and rejuvenation. The poster child for the former is Thomas J. Watson Sr., the longtime CEO of IBM who built the company into a major global organization. The story goes that in 1911, when Watson was in a meeting with sales managers at National Cash Register, he became frustrated by the lack of good ideas among the attendees. He called them out, saying, “The trouble with every one of us is that we don’t think enough… Knowledge is the result of thought, and thought is the keynote of success in this business or any business.”⁷ Watson decided that “THINK” would be the company’s slogan, and when he moved to IBM, he took the slogan with him. The concept pervaded IBM’s culture through the years; eventually “THINK” became an IBM trademark, and the company named its laptop the ThinkPad.

How reflection leads to learning is quite simple: thinking about what is occurring around us creates knowledge that undergirds learning. But can’t we also learn by doing? If Watson’s salespeople studied only sales and thought only about the sales process, wouldn’t they miss the nuances involved in actually selling? Yes, they would. The learning curve—the concept that performance improves, albeit at a decreasing rate, with each additional task—is foundational to our understanding of learning and will be discussed further in chapter 8. For now let’s look at how slowing down and thinking improves the way we learn.

Thinking Slow vs. Thinking Fast

Researchers propose that two systems sit beneath how we process information and therefore eventually learn.⁸ The first is a rapid-fire experiential system, typically automatic and unconscious. When we’ve learned what to do in a given situation—how to calm an irate client, for example—we engage that routine, not stopping to think whether it actually fits the current situation. The second system is a slow, conscious, and controlled approach to processing information. If the first system quickly follows rules that we’ve created, the second system is where those rules are made.

This fits the learning scholar Chris Argyris’s view of learning as both a single- and a double-loop process.⁹ Argyris illustrates his concept with the example of a thermostat. Single-loop learning resembles how, when the temperature varies from the current setting, the thermostat immediately responds by turning on the heating or cooling system to bring it back to the desired setting. When you engage your experiential learning system, you figure out how to use existing rules, goals, and processes to accomplish whatever task you face. That’s fine as far as it goes. But, Argyris notes, to understand root causes and truly improve over time requires double-loop learning. That involves asking, “Why is the thermostat set to a given temperature?” To answer, you need to turn on your conscious, controlled approach to information processing.

This two-step view has its roots in neuroscience. Research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) shows that the neural changes that result from experiential learning differ from those that result from reflection-driven learning.¹⁰

The double-loop process has two primary benefits for learning. The first is cognitive: we build knowledge. As you take time to think, you recognize things that you already know but haven’t taken the time to understand. You also make connections between new ideas. Moreover, as you reflect and identify what you don’t know, you can figure out strategies to fill those gaps.

The second benefit is behavioral: reflection builds self-efficacy—“the belief in one’s capabilities to organize and execute the course of action required to manage prospective situations.”¹¹ Feeling competent and capable is a basic motivation for individuals.¹² As you reflect on what you know, you recognize what knowledge you already have—and often you may discover that you know more than you thought, especially when you see the strengths and positives in your past experiences.¹³ As the tennis legend Stan Smith has said, “Experience tells you what to do; confidence allows you to do it.”

To understand the impact of reflection on learning, my colleagues Giada Di Stefano, Francesca Gino, and Gary Pisano and I conducted a field experiment with a technology services organization.¹⁴ I have to admit that when the four of us started the work, I was skeptical about what we would find. It wasn’t that I thought reflection doesn’t work; instead I assumed that in a real setting, people would already be reflecting—and close enough to an optimal amount that any effect we found would be minimal. But encouraging more reflection would certainly do no harm, so we crafted an intervention to observe its impact in a high-stakes, knowledge-intensive environment.

We focused on how the company prepared agents to handle voice and chat support for customers. The agents went through four weeks of technical training, at the end of which they took an examination to show technical competence. Failing the exam meant leaving the company. We began by randomly assigning 103 people to either the control group, which received the standard training, or the treatment group, which received a small intervention. At the start of the sixth day of training, the agents in the treatment group were given paper journals and asked to spend fifteen minutes at the end of the day reflecting on their learnings. We said, “Please reflect on and write about at least two key lessons. Please be as specific as possible.” The participants did this for ten days. After the remainder of the training, they took their technical competence test.

We asked both groups to report how much they thought they had learned. The people in the treatment group, who had kept journals, reported a higher level of individual learning, although the difference was not statistically significant. But when we saw the test scores, we were blown away by the difference. Those who had done the reflection journaling scored 31 percent higher than the control group, even when we accounted for numerous other factors such as age, experience, and gender.

To understand why this effect occurred, we went to the lab to do an experiment in which we taught people a simple sum-to-ten task: look at a 4 × 3 grid and click on the two numbers that sum to ten. Identify the pair in the grid below:

The answer is 0.28 and 9.72. With practice, one gets quicker at identifying the correct pair. We randomly assigned participants to a practice condition, in which for three minutes they completed more puzzles, or a reflection condition, in which they thought about how to improve. We found that the reflection group outperformed the practice group by more than 20 percent.

In addition to taking time for reflection, you must ensure that your body is properly rested and recharged when you’re trying to learn. It is easy to forget physiology when focusing on cognitive exercises. But preparing to learn does not mean merely preparing the brain. When we’re rested, we can fully tap into our analytic horsepower. We are also more likely to notice the details around us, rather than fixating on a particular aspect of a problem, or perhaps missing the problem entirely. It is impossible to keep at highly demanding tasks, be they cognitive or physical, indefinitely; breaks—both within a day and across days—allow us to recover and recenter so that we can move forward in a productive manner.

Challenges That Prevent Us from Learning from Contemplation

The case for contemplation is simple but powerful, yet reflection and relaxation practices are missing from most learners’ tool kits. Why? I chose to research this topic in part because of skepticism. I taught programs that included learning journals, but initially I assigned them out of obligation rather than a belief in their inherent value. As I have studied the topic and realized that we learn best by working less, I’ve also grown to understand why this is such a counterintuitive approach.

A simple story of soccer goalies illustrates the challenge most of us face. Michael Bar-Eli at Ben-Gurion University and his colleagues examined almost three hundred penalty kicks taken against goalies in professional competitions.¹⁵ For a penalty kick, the ball is placed eleven meters from the goal line and centered on the goal. The goalie must stay on the line but may move left or right before the ball is kicked. When the referee blows the whistle, the attacking player runs to the ball and kicks it toward the goal. Even at the highest professional level, penalty kicks typically result in a goal. The researchers found that goalies jump to the left 49.3 percent of the time, jump to the right 44.4 percent of the time, and stay in the center 6.3 percent of the time. Kicks, however, go to the left, right, or center 32.2 percent, 28.7 percent, and 39.2 percent of the time, respectively. Thus the authors concluded that staying in the center could have stopped 33.3 percent of the kicks, whereas jumping left or right would have stopped only 14.2 percent or 12.6 percent, respectively.

If goalies are more than twice as likely to stop a kick if they just stay put, why don’t they? For the same reason we don’t take time to reflect or recharge: all too often we have an action bias. We would rather be seen doing something than doing nothing. Norms suggest that when work needs to be done, we need to start working. When the going gets tough, the tough get going, right? These norms are locked firmly in our heads. Dan Cable and Kim Elsbach have done fascinating research into passive face time—simply being observed in the workplace, not actually doing any work.¹⁶ In a series of interviews and experiments, they found that being seen at work early or late led to assessments of “committed” and “dedicated.”

Additional research supports the fact that many of us consider working constantly to be a measure of status. For example, Silvia Bellezza, Neeru Paharia, and Anat Keinan conducted experiments in which they found that signaling busyness—for example, by shopping with an online grocery service rather than at an actual store, or wearing a wireless Bluetooth headset rather than a pair of corded headphones—gave people higher status in the judgment of US participants.¹⁷

The conventional wisdom in this case (as so often elsewhere) is wrong—at least when it comes to learning. Boston University professor Erin Reid studied overwork in consultants to see how it affected performance.¹⁸ She found that although managers penalized employees who admitted putting in less time at work, the managers could not tell the difference between those who really worked long hours and those who just said they did. She also found no difference in performance between those who worked more hours and those who worked fewer. So we return to the question: Why do we refuse to pause? Four things drive the phenomenon.

The first is regret—disappointment regarding an alternative course of action. In the soccer example, the researchers asked a sample of professional goalies about their optimal strategy for penalty kicks.¹⁹ The majority responded that they dove rather than stayed in the center of the goal. Moreover, when they were asked why, they most often said that they would regret having a goal scored when they had stayed in the center more than having a goal scored when they had dived. In other words, they wanted to be seen to be doing something, even if that something was wrong. Given that most tasks that require our attention involve uncertainty, it is inevitable that we will sometimes make the wrong choice. Remember, even though staying in the center would more than double a goalie’s chances of stopping the penalty kick, that strategy would still succeed only one-third of the time. Unfortunately, this fear of making the wrong choice prevents us from pursuing strategies that could help us both now and in the long run.

The second driver is that we confuse action with progress. In their book The Progress Principle, Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer explore the powerful motivation and engagement created when people generate positive momentum in work that is meaningful to them.²⁰ In other words, feeling good about progress can create virtuous cycles in which small wins add up over time to a large victory. The researchers used diary studies: knowledge workers recorded what happened on a given day, and the researchers analyzed the writing for patterns, revealing that small events within the workday (not only progress but also factors such as how leaders treat workers) can have a significant impact on creativity, innovation, and learning.²¹

But our desire for progress can cut both ways. For instance, completing small but relatively unimportant tasks produces an initial positive feeling, but we then have very little to show for it. Researchers studied this in loan repayment. Imagine that you have several loans of varying sizes with differing interest rates. Rationally, you should repay the loan with the highest interest rate first, even if only partially, in order to reduce your interest expense. But the researchers found that people often chose to pay off a small, lower-interest-rate loan first to reduce the number of loans outstanding.²² Diwas KC, Francesca Gino, Maryam Kouchaki, and I did research that shows a similar effect in emergency rooms. As doctors get busier, they are more likely to work on and discharge easier patients first in order to clear the decks. Obviously, this is often suboptimal. When it comes to learning, we frequently, and incorrectly, view action and progress as synonymous. Decoupling the two is necessary to overcome the action bias.

The third reason we don’t take breaks to reflect is that we underestimate the resulting cost. This can be seen in research into the impact of workload on performance. Traditionally, researchers looking at performance assumed that the amount of work needing to be done had no impact on the rate or the quality of performance. Experience suggests that this isn’t the case, so Diwas KC and Christian Terwiesch set out to show that performance does in fact change with workload.²³ In their study, health care workers sped up when they had more work to do—but the increased speed was unsustainable. If workers attempted (or were forced) to maintain this pace, performance eventually suffered dramatically. I have identified the same pattern in workers at a Japanese bank, and Stefan Scholtes of Cambridge University’s Judge School of Business and his colleagues found in a study of hospitals that the quality of outcomes suffered.²⁴

Although people recognize that overwork may negatively impact others, they don’t think it will affect them. In research I did with Hengchen Dai, Katy Milkman, and Dave Hofmann, we looked at hand-hygiene compliance in hospitals.²⁵ Proper hand hygiene is a key factor in preventing hospital-acquired infections, which are a leading cause of preventable deaths. We obtained radio frequency identification (RFID) data that recorded when caregivers went into hospital rooms and whether they washed their hands upon entering and leaving. We analyzed almost twenty million observations across thirty-five hospitals and found that not only did compliance fall almost nine absolute percentage points (from 59 percent to 50 percent) from the start of a shift to the end, but also that the decline was faster when caregivers had busier shifts. When I discuss these results with health care professionals, most are shocked by the size of the decrease.

Research looking at the negative effects of sleep deprivation finds similar misestimation. Only 1 percent to 3 percent of people can still function at a high level after only five or six hours of sleep. However, many people think they can. (Only 5 percent of those who believe that they would be high-functioning actually are.)²⁶

We not only underestimate how working continually impedes our performance but also fail to recognize that it may fundamentally change how we approach the task itself. Boston University professor Anita Tucker has spent much of the past two decades looking at learning in health care. Her work has generated many important insights, but one of the most important, in my view, is that busy professionals engage in single-loop learning at the expense of double-loop learning. In other words, when they are busy and encounter a problem, instead of identifying the root cause and learning how to address it, they simply come up with a quick workaround.²⁷ This is problematic not just because they miss learning opportunities; Tucker’s work also shows that, at least in health care, workarounds may create entirely new problems—such as when a nurse uses the wrong-size syringe for an injection and gives the patient the wrong amount of medication. We think it won’t happen to us, but when we keep going instead of taking time to recharge and reflect, it is at a much greater cost than we realize.

The fourth driver behind the action bias is that we tend to underestimate the gains possible from following the opposite strategy. As I’ve mentioned, even as a scholar of learning, I was skeptical about the value of reflection, so I decided to run a study to convince myself. As it turns out, I’m not alone in my skepticism. Extending the work with Giada DiStefano, Francesca Gino, and Gary Pisano, we decided to give participants a choice. After they had completed five sum-to-ten grids, we asked them if they wanted to spend three minutes practicing the task or three minutes reflecting. More than 80 percent chose to practice rather than reflect. But when they completed ten more grids, the reflection group outperformed the practice group by more than 20 percent.

When we sit at our desks and debate whether to take that short walk for a break or to brainstorm for five minutes on the problem at hand, we may think that the time not acting won’t help much, even though it often does. In another study, Pradeep Pendem, Paul Green, Francesca Gino, and I looked at the impact of unexpected breaks on workers’ performance.²⁸ Our setting was unique: tomato fields. Here workers drive large harvesters to gather ripe tomatoes. An oscillating clipper on the front of each machine cuts the plants from the roots; then the tomatoes and dirt and vines pass through a series of conveyors, opto-electronic sensors, and hand sorting before the tomatoes are dumped into a waiting trailer. Sometimes the trailers are delayed, so the harvester operators get a short break. An unexpected break is fantastic for researchers, because we can look for causal effects. We found that a break of perhaps five minutes could improve workers’ productivity by more than 10 percent. We repeated our analyses in the lab, providing participants with short, unexpected breaks, and again finding meaningful performance differences.

Successfully Contemplating to Learn

How can you ensure that you follow Phaedrus’s advice to divert the mind for better thinking? You can use five strategies. The first is to block out time for thinking. Describing his sales force, Thomas Watson Sr. said, “We don’t get paid for working with our feet—we get paid for working with our heads.”²⁹ However, most people’s calendars provide ample evidence of time set aside for their feet, at least metaphorically, as they rush from task to task. Early in my career, I was advised to determine what time of day I did my best thinking and to block out multiple hours at that point for writing. For me it’s the morning, so now “Writing” starts the day in my calendar. I can’t always protect that time; sometimes important meetings or classes get in the way. But because the time is blocked out, I must actively choose to disregard it. As a leader, you can encourage the people you work with to do the same—and then respect the time they have blocked out. For example, Tommy Hilfiger and other organizations have created no-meeting Fridays to give workers time to think and get their work done.

Jon Jachimowicz, Julia Lee, Francesca Gino, Jochen Menges, and I investigated whether reflection before the day starts, rather than at the end, positively affects performance. We knew that on average, people were not thinking enough at work and that most people don’t like their commutes. So we decided to see if we could address both challenges at the same time.

After preliminary studies, we recruited six hundred full-time employees who commuted at least fifteen minutes to work. Over the next four weeks, we surveyed them daily with short questionnaires. At the two-week mark, we randomly assigned them to one of three conditions: a control group, an enjoyment group, or a reflection group. We changed nothing for the control group and asked the enjoyment group to do something enjoyable during their commutes. The reflection group received the following text each day during weeks three and four:

We then surveyed the groups again. We found that the members of the reflection group improved their work outcomes and reduced the negative impact of their commutes. Moreover, other research shows that continually reflecting on performance is beneficial not only for individuals but also for teams.³⁰ The goal is to aid learning by making reflection a regular and ongoing part of your work. Taking time to engage your slow, thoughtful information-processing system is a powerful way to spark double-loop learning.

Sometimes people resist taking time to reflect, suggesting that their minds may wander or they may get bored. My answer to that is Yes! When we are bored and let our minds wander, we tend to be more creative. I try to always have a pad of paper with me when I head to meetings or group events, because I’m often at my most creative when the topic has moved away from me and I’m left alone with my thoughts. Research supports this perspective, finding that boredom can lead to creativity.³¹ So give your reflection time some guidance, but if it gets away from you on a given day, just let it go and see what happens.

The second strategy is to incorporate premortems for your most important decisions. The psychologist Gary Klein devised this idea as he sought to understand how to get project teams to dig deeper and learn to increase their likelihood of success. Klein and his colleagues found that when team members imagined that their project was already over, they improved their ability to identify possible outcomes by 30 percent.³² Building on this finding, Klein created the idea of a premortem. In a postmortem, a medical professional examines a dead body to understand the cause of death. In a premortem, an individual or a team asks, “If it’s twelve months from now and I (or we) have failed spectacularly, what happened?” This technique not only forces you to think carefully about a topic but also opens you up to the possibility that things can go wrong, and so leads to more creative ideas. A premortem may also help you avoid overconfidence and the assumption that your ideas can only succeed. It spurs the learning process before you begin the actual work.

The third strategy is to conduct an after-action review (AAR). In this case, reflection creates an opportunity to learn from what happened to improve future work. AARs are common practice in diverse fields around the world, ranging from the military to technology to health care to entertainment.³³ By scheduling regular reviews, you build reflection into the work process.

AARs start by comparing what actually happened with what was expected to identify either positive or negative deviations. To have a successful AAR, it is important to keep the goal—learning—in mind. That may mean turning to an outsider to facilitate the group discussion—thus helping to avoid blame—or involving a friend or a colleague if you’re considering only your own activities. Next, get a complete view of what happened (or didn’t happen) with the work. That means collecting information and perspectives from others, not limiting yourself to your own. Use your questioning skills to dig in and understand the root causes of the various outcomes. Finally, look to identify improved practices for the future. As a part of that process, be sure to think broadly. Yes, small steps need to be addressed in the single-loop learning category, but engage in double-loop learning to address the root causes identified and consider entirely new approaches to the work. How might you do it if you could start all over?

The fourth strategy is to have a plan for taking breaks. You need to take sufficient time to rejuvenate during the workday, between workdays, and on vacations if you are to position yourself to learn successfully. Research has attempted to identify optimal schedules for the workday, and you will see recommendations for taking a break every twenty-five or fifty-two or ninety minutes.³⁴ These findings are typically situation specific. It is unlikely that one length of time between breaks will be right for everyone—or even right for the same person all the time. What is important to recognize is that as your work grows more intense, the time between breaks should shorten. The other key is to think about how to ensure you take the break. Francesco Cirillo’s Pomodoro Technique—using a kitchen timer set at twenty-five minutes—is an extreme but sometimes effective approach to enforcement.³⁵ Know that your brain is working against you when it comes to breaks, so use your calendar, a colleague, or even a kitchen timer to help.

As you incorporate breaks into the workday, you need to make sure they provide you an opportunity to recharge. A break to address a discipline problem for your child at school is not the right kind. Overwhelmingly, the evidence tells us to incorporate movement and, if possible, time outside when we break.³⁶ We may think that going on Facebook or catching up on Twitter is restful, but it rarely is. We distract ourselves, which can sometimes be useful, but we don’t get a chance to recharge and rejuvenate. Getting up and walking around is a great beginning. Even better, go to a colleague’s office or go outside for a quick walk. I find pulling away the hardest part, but I always feel better and more alive after I take a quick turn around campus or stick my head in for a brief chat with a friend.

In addition to incorporating breaks within the workday, make sure that the time after work is both rejuvenating and restful. Do something you like, even if only briefly. Give your brain a rest by working out or playing a sport; research shows that regular exercise may increase the size of the hippocampus, the area of the brain that helps you learn.³⁷ Read a book, or have a casual conversation with a friend. The harder your day has been, the more recharging you need. In the hand-hygiene study mentioned earlier, we found that when caregivers had more-intense workdays, they needed more time off to recover and return to their normal compliance levels.³⁸ Finally, make sure that you get enough sleep. Ariana Huffington is in the forefront in explaining why sleep is so important for productivity, learning, and health.³⁹ Recognize that in many cases, the best thing you can do to learn is not to keep working but, rather, to go to bed and tackle the challenge in the morning.

The fifth and last strategy is to vacation. Getting time away from work is important for avoiding burnout, recovering energy, and clearing the mind for future learning. A study found that on average, Americans get eighteen days of vacation but take only sixteen of them.⁴⁰ How often to take a vacation, how long to make it, and where to go all have highly individualized answers. The general advice for the first two questions is more than you think and longer than you think. With respect to the third, it is important to take vacations that let you escape. For some people that will always be one type. For many others, it will evolve with the demands of life. Before we had kids, my wife and I would go to a beach when we were completely exhausted or visit other countries when we felt energetic. When our children were young, work was cognitively fatiguing and caring for three boys was even more tiring. Our family escape at that time was going to Disney World. I liked Mickey well enough, though I wouldn’t call myself a Disneyphile; but at Disney everything was taken care of, and the weather was warm, and that helped recharge me completely. Now, with the family in a different stage, our vacations have moved to more-active destinations. Avoid vacations that make you feel you need to take a vacation when you return; find those that will permit you to escape.

To more effectively use time for learning, focus on the end, not the means, when it comes to time management.⁴¹ By that I don’t mean ignore process; chapter 3 makes the argument for why process is vital to learning. What I mean is that whether you are leading others or just yourself, you shouldn’t confuse action with progress. Recognize that you (and others) may need to structure time in different ways. For example, Stanford’s Nick Bloom and his colleagues found that call-center workers were more productive when they could telecommute and thus weren’t restricted by office norms.⁴² Don’t judge the time strategies of others if they support their learning objectives.

And here’s an important caveat regarding scheduling: blocking out time for various activities is important and helpful, but learning doesn’t necessarily proceed in such a tightly controlled manner. As much as you might like to schedule time for learning and then have the answer at the end of it, you need some slack or downtime for reflection and thinking, because it may take longer than you wish. Not every idea is immediately useful, but taking time to let thoughts percolate is valuable.

Writing this book has been a wonderful, albeit sometimes frustrating, example of this process. The book draws on work I’ve been doing for the past ten-plus years, but trying to understand how the pieces fit together and how to construct the narrative has been a learning process for me. I have responsibly and consistently set aside time to do the work. But sometimes I don’t control my schedule, and writing time slips—such as when I’m teaching from 8:00 to 3:20 on a Tuesday. The productivity-seeking side of my brain gets frustrated at the lost opportunity. But I’ve found that when I do return to the work, I always have a better view of where things should go. I may not have the answer, but I see progress. So schedule your time in a productive manner, but fight the expectation that learning will always proceed linearly.

Busyness by itself doesn’t lead to learning. During a meeting with my mentor, Dave Upton, many years ago, I was rushing through my to-do list, trying to share everything I had done and everything I was working on. I have a tendency to talk fast when I get nervous, and this day I was flying a mile a minute. When I took a rare breath, Dave held up a hand to get me to pause. He waited a couple of seconds, looked me in the eye, and gave me one of the best pieces of advice I have ever received: “Brad, don’t avoid thinking by being busy.” So fight the urge to act for its own sake and instead recognize that when the going gets tough, the tough are rested, take time to recharge, and stop and think.