A Minute to Think with Juliet Funt: An EOFire Classic from 2022

How a Minute of Unassigned Time Rewrites Work

There is a small, stubborn belief threaded through modern work culture: relentless motion equals meaningful output. Juliet Funt has spent two decades watching that belief burn out the kindling of human potential, and she has a simpler counterproposal — a disciplined, intentional pause. Her metaphor is modest and vivid: a fire needs space between the materials for a spark to breathe, and people need unassigned time in the same way. That space, whether it lasts two seconds or an hour, is not emptiness; it is oxygen for ideas, empathy, and real accomplishment.

The white space that creates value

White space, as Funt defines it, is time with no assignment. That phrase is designed to be provocative: it distinguishes a moment you can travel into from one relentlessly tasked. When calendars are full and notifications insist you perform, the default assumption becomes that any unfilled minute is waste. But the brain’s default neural network is lively in quietness; it is where reflection, ideation, and planning take shape. Far from being mere leisure, white space surfaces better decisions, sharper creativity, and the kind of strategic thinking that turns activity into results.

Why the pause is more than wellness

Rest is the first thing people think of when told to slow down, and recuperation does matter — especially in a world still raw from global disruption. But Funt argues that recuperation is only one of four uses of white space. People also use it to reflect, to create, and to orient toward future action. The danger of treating pause as a wellness-only tool is that it becomes optional; by contrast, when organizations recognize white space as a fuel for ideation and productivity, it shifts from indulgence to infrastructure.

The hidden cost of perpetual busyness

There is a dollar figure attached to incessant activity, and it is rarely small. By asking workers what proportion of their emails, meetings, or reporting is unnecessary, and then converting those hours into salary costs, Funt’s team often finds an eye-opening number: roughly a million dollars of wasted time for every fifty employees. That figure captures only the direct economic waste. There are quieter, deeper costs: the attrition of top talent who refuse to spend brilliance on mindless tasks, the erosion of curiosity that stunts innovation, and the steady intrusion of workplace chaos into family life and joy.

When the best people leave

One of the most unsettling consequences of hyper-busyness is the flight of the most capable employees. Highly skilled people, when confronted with meaningless tasks that fragment their attention, will choose employers who value deliberate work. Instead of perks and gimmicks, these professionals crave the relentless dignity of a focused day where each move matters, not endless padding to the schedule. For leaders, the remedy is not free snacks; it is designing the work so that time is spent on tasks that use judgment and spark engagement.

Small practices that make white space practical

Funt offers an accessible architecture of micro-habits to seed white space across even the busiest days. Permission is the first and most overlooked tool: give yourself explicit, repeated authorization to pause. Entrepreneurs in particular carry an ingrained guilt about idle minutes, so permission must be said aloud, adopted publicly, and defended. Once the psychological barrier is lowered, the next move is to find training wheels — tiny, readily available pauses that are already offered by life.

• Start the day with a 30–60 second orientation before leaving the bed.
• Use waiting moments — a computer boot, a line at the store, being on hold — as offered pauses.
• Schedule five-minute breathers between meetings to recalibrate and prepare.

These little sips of thought are powerful. They interrupt momentum in service of presence and allow people to show up more fully for the next task. The effect compounds: a single strategic pause before a sales call, for instance, can turn a rote conversation into a high-leverage interaction.

Verbal accountability and boundary work

Another practical maneuver is to make promises out loud. If you tell the household you will be done with work by 7 p.m., that social contract becomes a protective hinge against creeping tasks. Workers who are remote or dispersed desperately need these exit rituals because the pandemic blurred the edges between home and job. Stating an end-time aloud transforms a private intention into communal agreement, and it dramatically reduces the temptation to lapse back into the inbox.

Recasting busyness as a design problem

Fixing busyness is not primarily about willpower. It is a design challenge that requires leaders to reorder time and systems so that unassigned moments are preserved and valued. Organizations that recognize the difference between activity and productivity do three things: they measure the wasteful signals in routine work, they redesign processes that force motion without meaning, and they protect white space as part of the job description. When leaders deliberately create oxygen for thinking, they do more than boost morale; they unlock the creative capacity that drives long-term growth.

There is a radical humility in this argument. It asks very busy people to do less of the wrong things in order to do more of the right ones. That trade-off sounds small but it is in fact tectonic: a repositioning of how time is treated and honored. A minute to think can be the hinge between attrition and retention, between frantic activity and measured productivity, between a life that is lived around work and a life where work is a meaningful contribution. The invitation is precise and quiet: build white space into the architecture of days, and the rest of the work — the decisions, creativity, and satisfaction — will follow. The final view from that pause is not the absence of duty but the presence of purpose.