I got up at 5am for four months. To think.

When did you last block one or two hours in your calendar to think about your biggest question?

Not the hardest task on your list. Not the project with the deadline. The other kind. Where is my career going? What do I want from this new role? Should I stay or leave?

People bring me these questions every week. Career direction. A moral dilemma at work. A new promotion with more responsibility. They come in different clothes, but underneath they are the same question: what kind of life do I want to live?

And every time I ask, "Have you spent any organised thinking time on this?", the answer is NO.

Think about how strange that is. A project you will forget in a few years gets a kickoff meeting, a slot in your calendar, a task list, a weekly check-in. The question that decides the next 10–20 years of your life gets whatever is left over. Sunday evening, if you're not too tired. The commute, if the podcast ends early.

We give our small problems a process and our biggest problems a mood. Here is how to change that 👇

The fly and the lion

There is a fly on your nose and a lion on the horizon. You swat the fly. Every time.

Not because the fly matters more. Because it is closer. The lion is still far away, and far away feels like later, and later feels like never.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago tested this in 2018 and called it the mere urgency effect. Across five experiments, people chose tasks with short deadlines over tasks with bigger payoffs, even when the deadline was artificial and the urgent task paid less. The effect was strongest among people who described themselves as busy.

Sounds familiar?

Every fly you are swatting today may be the product of a lion you didn't deal with earlier. The role you took because it was offered. The job you kept because leaving was uncomfortable. The relationship with your boss you never addressed.

Those were decisions. You made them by not making them.

And now you are living inside their consequences and calling it urgency.

"What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important." — Dwight Eisenhower

Why unstructured thinking fails

"I'll think about it when I have time" sounds reasonable. But without structure, our thinking tends to stay narrow.

One study examined 168 real business decisions and found that seven out of ten were framed as simple yes-or-no choices: buy the company or don't; launch or don't. Only three in ten seriously considered alternatives.

Often, we think we are making a decision when we are really choosing between the first two options that occurred to us.

There is another problem: the person who will live with the consequences is not quite the person making the decision today.

Researchers at UCLA put people in an fMRI scanner and asked them to think about themselves today, themselves in ten years, and a stranger. For many participants, the brain responded to their future self more like it responded to a stranger than to their present self.

You would not casually hand a stranger your career.

But every time you postpone the big question because something urgent appeared, that is essentially what you do.

Your future self is a stranger until you spend time with them.

Treat it like a project

So do what you already know how to do.

Treat the question like a project.

I did this in 2017 when I had to decide my own next move. From February to May, I got up at five and worked on it until seven. Two hours. Every weekday. Before the flies woke up.

I wasn't simply journaling or waiting for inspiration. I was working on the question the way I would work on a strategy for a client.

Here is how you can do the same:

1. Book the strategy meeting first

Book a 30-minute strategy meeting with yourself.

Do not try to solve the problem yet. Decide how you will work on it.

What do you need to learn? What assumptions need testing? Who should you speak with? What information are you missing? How much time does this decision deserve?

Most of us skip this step and go straight to worrying.

Worrying is thinking without a process.

2. Make it recurring

Big questions do not resolve in one sitting. They take time. Look at your calendar and block out the time each week to work on this.

3. Widen the options

Before you decide anything, write down at least three real alternatives.

Not "take the job or don't."

Not "stay or leave."

Ask: What is the third option? What would I do if neither of the obvious choices existed? What could I test before deciding?

If the third option is hard to find, you probably have not thought long enough yet.

4. Set the idea free

Make a list of two or three people to talk to. A mentor. A friend. A peer who is in the middle of the same thing, or came out the other side of it.

In 2017, some of the conversations that moved me most were with my friend Pedja and with my mentor Marshall.

Research suggests we are much better at spotting weaknesses in other people's reasoning than in our own. That is why saying the dilemma out loud matters.

Inside your own head, a dilemma is either too big or too small and never the right size. Say it out loud to someone, and it takes its real shape.

5. Make it a habit. Each time you are facing a big decision, you now have a system. Slow down, spend time strategizing how you will approach this problem, when you will work on it, who you can talk to, and what you need to learn and test out.

When the role gets bigger

All of this matters most at the moment you are least likely to do it: when you step into a bigger role.

Uncertainty runs higher. More people depend on you. Everything arrives marked urgent, and most of it is somebody else's fly. Watkins' research on leadership transitions found the same pattern again and again: new appointees spend their first months reacting to problems they inherited, and the question of what the role should be gets answered by default. By the time the flies thin out, the job has already decided what it is.

There is a second cost. The people I see burn out are rarely the ones with the most work. They are the ones with no time to choose which work matters. Every task feels equal, so every task gets full weight, and the weight never comes off. Structured time to think is the closest thing to an anti-burnout habit I know. It is where you decide what deserves you, and what does not.

So if you have just been promoted, or handed more responsibility, treat the role itself as the big question you need to devote some consecutive strategic time to think.

The alignment

Structured time on your biggest question does something no amount of side-thinking does. It puts your identity, your values, and your purpose in the same room and makes them align. Once they agree, the small decisions get easy. You can see which meeting, which offer, which fight is feeding the larger direction, and which is noise you will not remember by Christmas.

After twenty years of doing this myself and helping others do it: time spent on your life & career direction is the best investment you will make this year!

Time for action & adventure

Pick one big, long-term question.

Block the first 30 minutes in your calendar before you close this page. Use it to plan the rest.

Name two people you will talk to about it. Message the first one now.

Twenty years from now, you will not remember this quarter's project. You will remember the direction you chose, or the one you drifted into without thinking.

One of those takes an hour a week. The other takes a decade to undo. Give your own life the meeting it deserves ✊