Remote working brings real benefits; I'm an advocate. Less commuting, wider talent pools, dead time reclaimed, and my kids now know me, but there's a robotic cost. We become governed by 30-minute slots, bouncing from call to call to keep the machine synchronised and moving. Sometimes I'm a rebel and schedule 20-minute calls to keep people on their toes.

In teams that are stretched or under pressure to deliver, especially those working in sub-optimal systems, this space tax erodes something meaningful. When people lose space, they lose their human touch; the individual is exchanged for the function. The signs appear long before the collapse, a shift of tone and temperament. People become less kind, less creative, and more mechanical. Eventually, when space becomes too scarce, it leads to sick days or conflict. Not from malice, but from the insidious drift of sacrificing room to breathe and imagine.

Trading space for time is an established military maxim, but in knowledge work, we often need to do the reverse: trade time for space. We aren't retreating to yield ground to an enemy; we're reclaiming the ground of our own minds. The space we compete for isn't land that can be taken from us, but cognitive, digital and emotional room to think. To offer ourselves that space, we must sacrifice time. If we fail to do this, we sacrifice more than productivity; we sacrifice impact, inclusivity, diversity and creativity itself.

When we become trapped in systems that control our space and time, we lose the opportunity to change them. Our capacity for impact shrinks until we’re no longer shaping the work but merely sustaining it. We become a cog in the machine rather than an agent capable of changing it.

We hire for diverse perspectives and build teams that promise inclusion, but the grind often works against it. Under pressure, the very systems designed to harness difference end up homogenising it. Without space for reflection or dissent, perspectives flatten, and creative divergence disappears.

Above all, our best problem-solving often happens away from the problem itself. We find breakthroughs not by staring harder, but by giving our subconscious space to work and then letting it align with conscious thought. Even John Boyd, in his OODA framework, recognised that orientation —the act of making sense —requires both time and cognitive space. The gap between perception and action may be minuscule, but within it lies judgment. To see complexity clearly, we must treat it not as an instant impression to be decoded, but as a tapestry that deserves more than a fleeting glance.

If we find that we or those around us can’t create space, it’s often because the work feels too important to step away from. Sometimes the culture rewards intensity, or the project is late, and escalations have become the norm. In those moments, it helps to remember an old truth: slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. Heroics aren't sustainable, and they aren't leadership by example. We become experts through repetition and experience, but those repetition cycles have to be representative of the practices we want to scale, not an exacerbation of what's already broken.

From a leadership perspective, no one aspires to be the leader who is too harassed to think. Who wants to follow someone so consumed by the system that they can no longer change it? At every level of an organisation, the courage to pause, to claim autonomy over your own time is both an act of leadership and a recognition of what lies within, and beyond, your control. Demonstrating you value thoughtfulness permits others to do the same, just as demonstrating self-care gives others the permission to look after themselves too.

In war, space buys time; in leadership, time buys space.