Cal Newport, the Georgetown professor who turned “deep work” into a household phrase, went viral with a simple message for 2026: your brain needs help starting focused work, and needs help stopping interruptions.
Look at what a full calendar hides. In Microsoft’s 2025 Infinite Workday research, the average knowledge worker is interrupted every two minutes during core hours, roughly 275 times a day by meetings, emails, and chats.
And you, dear leader, are not exempt. You may be the most interrupted person in the building. Your calendar looks productive. It’s often just… full.
Full Is Not the Same as Effective
The quiet belief running most executive calendars is that a packed day is a valuable day. It isn’t. A day with no space to think is a day you spend reacting while the decisions that move the organization are made in haste, or wait for a you who never shows up. Thinking time isn’t the reward you get after the important work. For leaders, it is the important work.
Protecting your thinking is hard to do alone. The Amare Leadership Lab is a small-group experience for senior leaders who want to lead with more clarity, presence, and love — and less noise. We work on exactly this: how to make room for the deep, human work of leadership without dropping the ball on everything else. Come explore what it could do for you and your team, at amareleadership.com/amare-leadership-lab . Next Lab starts in September!
Instant Thought Experiment
Look at your calendar for last week. Now find the block where you did nothing but think — no inbox, no meeting, no text, no phone. Not planning, not replying. Thinking. If you can’t find it, sit with the discomfort. Then consider it an invitation.
Mirror: Two Questions to Reflect On
1. When was the last time you made a big call from a place of thought rather than a place of hurry?
2. If your team copied how you actually spend your day, would they protect their thinking, or stay busy to look committed?
Window Into Bill Gates’ Thinking Habit
For decades, Bill Gates did something that looks almost irresponsible for a CEO: twice a year he disappeared. His famous “Think Week” meant a week alone without meetings or visitors or drop-ins. He spent his time reading, reflecting, and thinking, just thinking. Some of Microsoft’s most consequential strategic turns trace back to ideas that surfaced in that silence.
One of the most successful leaders of his era treated undistracted thinking as a scheduled, non-negotiable, essential part of the job, not a someday luxury. Bottom line is this: the thinking didn’t happen despite his calendar. It happened because he protected a time and place for it.
What the Research Says
Protected thinking time is a performance driver, not a wellness perk. A peer-reviewed study of 262 CEOs, all Harvard Business School alumni, found that the strongest performers make decisions by reasoning things through, weighing options, testing assumptions. And they ran larger, faster-growing companies. But, newsflash, you cannot effectively reason things through in two-minute fragments.
Now set that against the interruption data, every two minutes, 275 times a day. Be clear: the cost of never protecting your thinking time shows up in the quality of your leadership and decisions.
Door Into Action: 5 Amare Leadership Steps to Protect Your Thinking
1. Block your deep work before the day fills in. Put one 60–90 minute block on tomorrow’s calendar first, and defend it like any critical meeting.
2. Build a startup ritual, per Cal Newport. Before a thinking block, do one small repeatable thing — a walk, making tea, clearing your desk — to signal focus. Start this week.
3. Build a shutdown routine to actually end the day. Do a final inbox scan, glance at tomorrow, write down loose threads, and close the laptop with a clear “we’re in a good place.”
4. Schedule a “Think Day” this quarter. You’re not Bill Gates, but borrow the principle: one half-day, no meetings, no phone, for the questions that never get airtime.
5. Model it out loud for your team. Tell people you’re blocking think-time and why. When the leader protects thinking openly, the team stops equating “always available” with “valuable.”
Amare Team Talk
Bring one question to your next team meeting: “Where in our week do we actually think — and where are we just being busy at each other?” Give people time to think of their answer before responding!
Making the Shift
Underneath the crazy full calendar hides an uncomfortable truth: for many of us, busyness is a hiding place. Activity feels safe. Stillness feels exposed. But that’s fear running the schedule, not love.
Protecting your thinking is an act of love. Love for the people who deserve your best judgment. Love for the organization that needs you clear. And love for yourself. Your calendar isn’t the boss. You are.
Enjoy your big think!
–Moshe
Today’s Amare Wave Wednesday Quote
“It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?”
— Henry David Thoreau, essayist and naturalist
Click here and read more Amare Wave Wednesday newsletters on related topics:
Time to Think: The Leadership Essential That’s Sacrificed Way Too Often
Be Quiet! A Powerful Habit Most Leaders Don’t Practice
Slow Down, You Move Too Fast: The Hidden Business Costs of “Always On”
Many Leaders Don’t Need a Better Why: When Purpose Gets Buried Under Busyness
Five Unconventional Ways to Answer the Big Question: What Business Are You In?
