Two philosophers, separated by more than two thousand years, approached the same leadership challenge from different directions: how to live with greater awareness and intention.
Socrates argued that the unexamined life is not worth living. Søren Kierkegaard is often translated as observing that life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards. Read together, they describe the challenge every leader faces at mid-year: the pull to keep moving forward colliding with the need to pause, look back, and recalibrate.
Purposeful progress requires more than endless motion. It requires examination. It asks you to stop long enough to test whether the work, choices and commitments that have filled your days are still serving what matters.
The Busyness Trap: Why Activity Is Not the Same as Progress
You likely don’t need research to tell you that you are spending a lot of time in meetings. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index reported a 252% increase in weekly meeting time for the average Teams user since February 20201. Atlassian’s research also points to the cost of meeting overload, with many knowledge workers reporting that meetings make it harder to get their work done2.
We are busy. There is lots of activity, but activity and progress don’t always correlate. So while activity may be rising, progress doesn’t automatically rise with it. Leaders often find themselves caught in the busyness trap, where constant activity creates the illusion of progress while distracting them from what matters most.
In many leadership roles, this pressure is even more acute: more decisions, meetings, requests and issues requiring attention.
Busyness is reactive and fills whatever space is available. In contrast, purposefulness is intentional and shapes the space before it fills it.
Cognitive scientist Gloria Mark’s research suggests it can take, on average, about 23 minutes to resume an interrupted task3. When your day is structured around constant interruption, the cost is not just time. It is depth, quality and the kind of strategic thinking that leadership demands.
As well, when you can’t distinguish between what is urgent and what is important, urgency usually wins. And urgency rarely drives meaningful progress on its own.
So where do you start? With an honest look at where your time is actually going.
Your Mid-Year Marker
The issue is not whether your calendar is full; I’m sure it is!
It is whether your choices have been examined, and whether those choices are still purposeful.
In a Dominican University study, Professor Gail Matthews found that participants who wrote down their goals, committed to action steps and sent weekly progress reports to a supportive friend achieved significantly more than those who merely thought about their goals4.
The lesson from that research isn’t that writing magically changes the future. It is that clarity, commitment and review make progress more visible and accountable.
Yet regular stock-takes are easy to skip. The year gathers pace, the calendar fills, and reflection gets displaced by what’s immediate and urgent.
That is why setting aside time to reflect at the calendar year’s mid-way point matters. The mid-point is more than an administrative marker or the end of the financial year. It is a natural inflexion point, and when used wisely, it will help you enter this new period with clarity, intention and momentum.
To do that well, you need two things: an honest audit of how you have been spending your time, and a deliberate review of what the past six months have taught you.
The audit shows you where your time has gone, while the review helps you understand what that time has produced. Together, they give you the evidence you need to decide what deserves your attention next.
Pause and Audit: Where Is Your Time Actually Going?
Before you can redesign how you lead and work over the next six months, you need an accurate picture of how you led the last six.
Ask yourself five questions:
- Am I conscious of how I use my time, or am I reacting to whatever comes up first?
- Is my work purpose-driven and focused, or largely driven by others’ agendas?
- Will the activities I completed this week move me a step closer to my goals?
- How much time am I investing in activities that create genuine value?
- What have I consistently avoided that I know deserves my attention?
These questions are diagnostic. Answered honestly, they reveal the patterns behind your busyness: where your time is going, whose priorities are shaping your day, and which important work is being crowded out.
That insight matters because you can’t change a pattern you have not named.
Once you can see the gap between how you spend your time and what matters most, the next step is to redesign your week before it starts. This is where time blocking becomes useful.
Time blocking is the practice of mapping your week in advance, often in 30-minute increments, and protecting the blocks that matter most. It helps you move from reacting to whatever arrives to making deliberate choices about what gets your best attention.
If it sounds structured, that’s because it is. But structure, in this context, is not a constraint, but the architecture of intentional leadership.
I can attest to how helpful this approach is. As well, leaders I work with tell me that when they deliberately design their week, they experience clearer thinking, better output and less end-of-week depletion.
The Past Is a Resource, Not a Burden
After you have audited how your time has been spent, the next step is to investigate what the past six months have taught you.
That does not always come naturally to leaders. Many are future-focused, forward-moving and impatient with anything that looks like looking back. Reflection can feel indulgent when there are decisions to make, targets to meet and people waiting for direction.
Yet looking back is not the same as going backwards.
The past holds data. It shows you the decisions that worked, the patterns that repeated, the assumptions that held and the signals you missed. It also shows you which ideas deserve more attention.
Consider the work of Charles Handy, one of the most prescient organisational thinkers of the last half-century. In The Elephant and the Flea, published in 2001, Handy explored the rise of independent work, portfolio careers and the changing relationship between large institutions and individual contributors5. In The Empty Raincoat, he challenged leaders to rethink organisations, careers and meaning6.
Decades later, many of these ideas still circulate in leadership conversations as though they are new. In fact, old ideas are often recycled and refashioned as ‘new ideas’. The issue isn’t that old ideas are always right; far from it. It’s about remembering that the past is a resource we often underuse.
Professor Teresa Amabile’s research on the “progress principle” also reinforces why this matters7. Progress on meaningful work is one of the most powerful drivers of motivation and performance.
You can’t know whether you are making real progress unless you pause long enough to examine what has changed, what has stalled and what the evidence is telling you.
The focus here is on reflection, not rumination. Rumination loops around blame, regret and threat, and can intensify negative thinking rather than generate useful insight.
Reflection is purposeful because it helps you extract lessons, turning experience into insight and enabling you to choose a better response next time.
The goal is to deliberately learn from the past, take what is useful, and move forward with greater clarity.
A Five-Step Process for Learning from the Past
Purposeful reflection does not happen by accident. Research suggests reflective practice is most useful when it is structured, deliberate and connected to action. Without structure, it can easily become vague, selective or circular. For example, you revisit the same events, confirm the same assumptions, and call it insight.
To make reflection useful, you need a process that turns experience into evidence, and evidence into better choices. Here are five steps that will help.
Step One: Identify what deserves attention
What ideas, decisions or patterns from the first half of the year warrant a closer look? What have you been avoiding, and why does it matter now?
Step Two: Seek credible inputs
Look beyond your first interpretation. Whether you are reviewing your own experience, feedback from others or external research, go broad before you go deep. Be deliberate about your sources and honest about the perspective they carry. Everyone holds assumptions. Know the lens before you trust the view.
Step Three: Study the data and surface the insights
Look for what is genuinely relevant. What patterns are emerging? What surprised you? What confirms what you already suspected? What challenges your assumptions?
Both confirmation and contradiction can be useful, provided you are willing to examine them.
Step Four: Challenge the meaning you are making
This is where reflection becomes strategy. What are you taking from the evidence? Is that interpretation fair, complete and useful? What will you continue, stop or start doing as a result?
Step Five: Decide what moves forward and what gets left behind
Some habits, commitments, beliefs and ways of working no longer serve you. Be clear about what needs to change. Holding onto something simply because it once worked is not loyalty. It is inertia.
The value of this process is not in looking back for its own sake. It is in extracting the lessons that will help you lead the next six months with sharper focus and greater intent.
Design Forward with Intention
Once you have examined where your time has gone and what the past six months have taught you, the next step is to design forward with intention.
That means closing the gap between what you intend to do and what you actually do. It means treating your time as a strategic resource, not a container that fills itself. It means building your days around your priorities rather than rebuilding your priorities around your days.
Three questions can anchor that forward design:
- What are the three outcomes that would make the next six months genuinely significant?
- What habits, meetings or commitments are consuming time without generating enough value?
- What will you stop, start and continue from here?
These are not questions to answer once and file away. They are questions to return to regularly, building the cadence of reflection and recalibration that separates reactive leadership from purposeful, influential leadership.
Your Mid-Year Choice
The first half of the year gives you the evidence: where your energy has gone, where progress has stalled, and where activity has been mistaken for impact. Once you’ve taken the time to audit and digest, your choice is whether to use that insight to design the next six months with greater clarity, intention, and purpose.
Getting you ready for tomorrow, today®
Award-winning author and global workplace expert, Dr Michelle Gibbings, helps leaders, teams and organisations unlock strategic influence to accelerate progress.
References
- Microsoft WorkLab. (2023). Will AI fix work? 2023 Work Trend Index annual report. Microsoft. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/will-ai-fix-work
- Atlassian. (2024). The State of Teams. https://www.atlassian.com/blog/state-of-teams-2024
- Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008). The cost of interrupted work: More speed and stress. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 107–110). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357072
- Matthews, G. (2015). Goal research summary. Dominican University of California. https://www.dominican.edu/sites/default/files/2020-02/gailmatthews-harvard-goals-researchsummary.pdf
- Handy, C. (2001). The elephant and the flea: Reflections of a reluctant capitalist. Hutchinson; Harvard Business School Press.
- Handy, C. (1994). The empty raincoat: Making sense of the future. Hutchinson.
- Amabile, T., & Kramer, S. (2011). The progress principle: Using small wins to ignite joy, engagement, and creativity at work. Harvard Business Review Press.