When did you last get ninety minutes to think?

Here's an uncomfortable question. When did you last spend ninety uninterrupted minutes thinking about your business, rather than working in it? Not answering emails about it. Not firefighting for it. Thinking. If you can't remember, you're in the majority, and the majority is making worse decisions than it needs to.

The doing trap

Running a business generates infinite doing. Every hour has a queue of urgent things attached, and the owner is usually the vending machine every decision comes to. So the day gets spent dispensing answers, the evening gets spent on admin, and the thinking, the actual weighing of what the business should do next, gets pushed to some mythical quiet week that never arrives. Busy-ness feels like progress. It's often the opposite: motion spent executing last year's assumptions at speed.

Thinking is the job

Every decision that genuinely moves a business is a thinking output. What to charge. Who to hire, and who to stop carrying. Which customers to say no to. What to stop doing entirely. None of these emerge from a full calendar; they emerge from the gaps in one. And here's the part owners resist: nobody else in the business is going to do this. Your team is paid to execute. The thinking seat is yours, and it's been empty for months.

Why talking beats staring at a wall

The cheapest version of this fix is free: book ninety minutes with yourself, phone off, and write down the three questions you've been avoiding. Do that before anything else. But there's a reason executives at large firms don't think alone: a good thinking partner compresses the process brutally. Saying the problem out loud to someone outside your business forces the vague dread into specific sentences, and specific sentences can be worked on. Someone who has seen your problem before, at several sizes, can tell you which worry is real and which is noise. That's the entire design of Let's just talk: ninety minutes on whatever's circling, nothing to prepare, and you leave with the thinking done and written down.

Do this this week

Book the ninety minutes, with yourself or with me, and protect it like a client meeting, because it is one; you're the client. If daytime is impossible, and for most owners it is, that's precisely why the evening slots exist: six until eight, Monday to Thursday, for people whose thinking time got eaten by everyone else's urgency. The business gets your leftovers all day. Once in a while, it deserves the good hours.

Ian Sharpe

Fractional executive and portfolio consultant. The person you meet is the person who does the work. Who am I? →