How are we supposed to create more time for ourselves when it feels like time is being taken away from us? It’s a valid question my leaders are asking as the conversation around the availability of time and space in our schedules continues to shift and change.
It’s a hard price we think we must face as we inch our way towards our goals. Meeting deadlines, supporting others on your teams and carrying the mental and physical load of a full life in 2026; saying it’s a lot is an understatement. Additionally, it would be unfair to say the state of the world does not play an effect on us from day-to-day. Research shows that our experiences, demands, emotions and resources do not stay neatly separated between two different parts of our life, “work” and “real life”. The research supports a bidirectional relationship meaning life affects work and work affects life.
My response is this; Harvard Business School’s professor Ryan Buell says, “Mediocrity has to be measured; excellence wants to reveal itself.” I relate this conversation here because all the most excellent parts of ourself we need to give time and space for us to recognize it, cultivate it and allow it to flourish. Time for growth isn’t necessarily about finding more hours; it’s about intentionally creating space for the parts of ourselves we want to develop.
I’ll give you a few examples of how this can apply.
- Maybe you’ve been thinking about becoming a better communicator. You know there are conversations you could handle differently, questions you could ask more thoughtfully or moments when you could pause instead of immediately responding. But when the calendar is full and the demands are high, development can feel like something that belongs on another day. Creating space for growth might simply mean taking five minutes after an important conversation to ask yourself: What worked? What didn’t? What would I do differently next time? Too often than not we do not count these moments of reflection as development, too.
- Maybe you are leading a team, and you recognize that you have become so focused on getting the work done that you have less time to lead the people doing it. Creating space might mean proving thirty minutes each week to have a meaningful conversation with someone on your team. This conversation not centered around a deadline, deliverable or problem, but focused on discovering more of who the person is.
- Maybe your growth is personal. You want to read more, become more comfortable with uncertainty, reconnect with your creativity, strengthen a relationship or simply understand yourself a little better. These things can easily become the first things we remove from our schedules when life becomes busy because they don’t always feel urgent. But not urgent does not mean not important. Sometimes the things that appear to be taking us away from productivity are the very things restoring the capacity we need to show up to be fully ourselves.
And perhaps this is the larger question we should be asking ourselves as we move toward 2027: What deserves space in my life? Not just what needs to get done or what is asking for my attention. Not just what has a deadline attached to it or what doesn’t. It’s more asking what part of me is asking to be developed, explored, strengthened or seen?
Too often we feel that growth only occurs when we are adding something into our lives, but perhaps growth doesn’t always require more. Perhaps it requires us to become more intentional about what we make room for.
Excellence may already be within us; our responsibility is to create enough time and space to recognize it, cultivate it and allow it to flourish.
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Dawn Xx
