Stop Telling Yourself You Don't Have Time
Stop Telling Yourself You Don't Have Time
PLUS: The 5 Worst Brain Myths
August 16, 2026
“Rest is not something that the world gives us. It's never been a gift. It's never been something you do when you've finished everything else. If you want rest, you have to take it. You have to resist the lure of busyness, make time for rest, take it seriously, and protect it from a world that is intent on stealing it.”
\- Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Mid-August is one of those rare windows for reflection, rest and recovery. I don’t want you to waste it like I did.
In my corporate career I prided myself on being resilient and being ‘always on’. I got lost in the glamorisation of being busy.
It meant holidays where I wasn’t truly present. It meant time on my phone that could have been spent with loved ones. It meant mistaking cheap dopamine hits for true relaxation.
I don’t want you to fall into the same trap.
Imagine there was a pill that gave you a greater understanding of yourself, allowed you to switch off and left you feeling re-energised.
You don’t need that pill: you just need to do 2 things.
Understand that rest is one of the most productive things you can do.
Treat your time like you would your finances and spend it where you’ll get the greatest return. That way rest becomes part of you performing at your best, not a reward for it.
THE SCIENCE
There’s a lot I could say here, but you’re smart enough to know the fundamentals already. Instead, I want to draw your attention to the trap you may not even know exists.
Sleep researcher Dr Hans Van Dongen at the University of Pennsylvania restricted a group of subjects to six hours of sleep a night for two weeks and tracked their cognitive performance daily. Their attention and reaction times declined steadily, day after day, with no plateau. By day 14, their performance was equivalent to someone who'd been awake for 24 hours straight.
But here’s the trap I’m talking about: they didn't realise it. Their own ratings of how tired they felt levelled off after a few days, even though their actual performance kept getting worse. They'd adapted to feeling depleted and mistook that adaptation for being ‘normal’.
In simple terms: the longer you go without proper recovery, the less able you are to accurately judge your own decline.
I’m being deliberately provocative, but telling yourself you’re fine, that you’re just pushing through, is exactly what a drink-driver says when they get behind the wheel.
You need to know when your brain is lying to you.
THE PROOF
Warren Buffett doesn’t use a smartphone.
Bill Gates disappears for ‘Think Weeks’. No calls. No emails.
Tori Dunlap runs a multimillion-pound financial education company. Every quarter, she shuts the entire business down for a full week.
None of them have fewer demands on their time than you, so when you tell yourself you don’t have the time, is that really true, or just the story you’ve been telling yourself?
I know you won’t necessarily have the same level of autonomy, but my provocation still stands.
I want you to sit with the question underneath it: what have you decided is essential that actually isn't?
THE APPLICATION
Think of my provocations this week as an ignition point for change, designed to get you thinking differently.
If you accept that rest can be like a magic pill, it’s worth making time for it.
And if you accept that not everything you currently do is essential, you can find the time for it.
From here, just experiment. Try different things to break the cycle and build new habits. Remember that rest can be active as well as passive. That hike in nature will be better for switching off than lying on the sofa watching Netflix.
Also be aware of one final trap: boredom is not a bad thing. Your ‘always-on’ mindset will mean that your brain signals deep discomfort from doing nothing. That is not an alarm bell. It's just that you've trained your brain to crave the next quick hit. Resist it. Boredom should be embraced, not feared. It's where some of your best thinking will happen.
The best single new habit I’ve built since I stepped away from the corporate treadmill? A 20-minute walk in my local park at least 3 times a week. When the weather’s good I’ll also sit on a bench and watch the world go by. Possibly with a notebook in case any thoughts spring to mind.
The old me would have said that I was just wasting time. He was wrong. Those moments are some of the most important and productive I have.
Go find yours. Right now may be exactly the right time to start.
Go well.
J.
🔥 LIVE BETTER, LEAD BETTER
The best content I researched this week:
1. Dr Austin Perlmutter debunks 5 brain myths that may be holding you back. Spoiler alert: one is that you can’t rewrite your brain.
2. And so the key with change is just sticking to it: 6 simple slides on the neurology of consistency.
3. Finally, James Clear of Atomic Habits fame has 1 great question for you.
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