I would like to start this post with a quote by Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber, French journalist and essay-writer:
"...Would you accept to sit in a car rushing through the night with its main beams becoming progressively shorter as its speed increases?..."
Practically, who has not sat in a meeting where a jam-packed agenda had to be covered in a super tight time frame and everyone left the meeting not really understanding what that meeting amounted to? Who has not faced an urgent problem and dived into it with a preconceived approach which turned out to be completely ineffectual? Who has never regreted later (sometimes much later) not having listened to a small and timid voice in the room airing a hunch or a concern?
On the other hand, we all have sat in meetings that ran over time where an inexistent agenda led absolutely nowhere. Constrained time and some structure are absolutely essential to achieving focus. Furthermore, in everyone of the many meetings I have had with senior executive and CEOs, time was a very scarce commodity not to be wasted. And clearly, if these successful managers and professionals have reached their current level of success, using time wisely ought to have been a key ingredient of their success.
There is a balance to be found between slow and fast, between slack and urgency. It is in the intensity of limited time, lived in full awareness that lies a space of timelessness from which winning insight emerges.
Feature photo: Day Dreaming (2000) by Torii Yoshinari
I think the balancing rule is “apply as much time needed to the important things, and get done as quickly as possible with the unimportant things that nevertheless have to be done”.
This rule turns the question from a quesiton of balance to a question of deciding what is important and what is not. And surprise surprise, you end up once again at the subject many people are notoriously poor about: making priorities, even if it means conciously dropping things.
It gets really hard when you have so many things to do and so little time that the list of things to be dropped gets much longer than the list of things to be taken forward – maybe this is the moment one should stop, and get a structure in place that can deal with the number of subjects in a sustainable way. which gets us to the next point many people – expecially excecutives – are poor at: letting go, and passing responsibility (and therefore power) to others.