Most business owners and advisers complain that they never have enough time.
Recently, I unexpectedly acquired more of it than I wanted.
A seizure resulted in an extended stay in hospital while the excellent neurology team at the John Radcliffe investigated what was happening and began treatment. Suddenly, a diary containing client meetings, networking, golf and all the normal demands of working life became largely irrelevant.
I had very little control over what happened next.
That is where Stoicism proved useful.
Focus on what you can control
One of the central Stoic principles is the distinction between what is within our control and what is not.
I could not control the diagnosis, the tests, the treatment programme or when I would be discharged. Nor could I do very much about the inevitable periods of waiting that form part of hospital life.
I could control how I responded to them.
That did not mean pretending that everything was fine or attempting to turn a hospital ward into an office. Recovery had to come first.
But I discovered that there was still quite a lot I could do.
I continued conversations with clients and colleagues when I felt able. I offered advice, reviewed issues and kept several pieces of work moving. Modern technology makes that remarkably easy. A telephone, Chromebook and Wi-Fi meant that being physically removed from the office did not necessarily mean being intellectually removed from the business.
More importantly, the enforced pause gave me time to think.
Are urgent tasks crowding out important thinking?
Advisers spend much of their lives helping other people solve problems. The danger is that we become so busy responding to immediate demands that we leave too little time for reflection.
The hospital stay dramatically removed those demands.
There were long periods when there was nowhere I needed to be and nothing immediately requiring my attention. Rather than regarding all of that time as wasted, I began using some of it to think about priorities, decision-making and execution.
There was a certain irony in this.
A hospital is an extraordinary environment in which to observe priorities in action. Doctors, nurses, specialists and support teams are constantly balancing urgency, importance, resources, dependencies and changing circumstances.
A treatment may be important but dependent upon a specialist being available. Another procedure may suddenly become more urgent. Plans change because new information arrives. What looked like today’s priority becomes tomorrow’s task.
For somebody already interested in leadership and decision-making, it was difficult not to notice the parallels with business.
So I started writing.
Turn thinking time into something useful
Those observations eventually became the basis of my latest book, Turning Priorities into Reality.
I certainly did not go into hospital intending to write another book. But the experience gave me both the time and the material to develop ideas that had already been forming through my advisory work.
That, perhaps, is the wider lesson.
Enforced downtime comes in many forms. It does not require a hospital admission. A cancelled meeting, delayed train, postponed project or unexpectedly quiet week can all create space that we had not planned to have.
The instinct is often to regard that time as lost.
It need not be.
What could you do with an unexpected pause?
Sometimes the best use of downtime is simply to recover. Sometimes it is to catch up with people. Sometimes it is to read, think or reconsider a problem that has been pushed aside by more urgent matters.
And occasionally it gives us the opportunity to create something new.
The Stoics would remind us that we cannot always choose our circumstances. We can choose our response to them.
I would still have preferred not to spend several weeks in hospital.
But given that I was there, I was determined not to waste the experience.