The Case for Thinking Time

I want to talk about something that might sound lazy on the surface but is, in reality, the most productive thing you can do: thinking time.

Naval Ravikant, the author of The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, often talks about how his biggest breakthroughs come from doing nothing but thinking. Whole days dedicated to space. No calls. No meetings. No endless tasks. Just time to let ideas breathe.

Most people don’t do this. In fact, most people don’t know how to do this. If we suddenly get a gap in the diary, we panic. We reach for the phone, start scrolling, or invent new tasks just to fill the silence. But that silence is where the real work happens.

How Thinking Built My Businesses

I’ve built two businesses, SETL and Cobra Consultancy Group, and I can say without hesitation that neither of them would exist without thinking time.

I probably spend more time thinking than most people are comfortable admitting, at least a few hours a day. And honestly, those hours have done more to move me forward than any 50-hour working week I ever had. In my past jobs, I had to keep a busy calendar so my bosses would see I was “valuable.” Packed meetings, crammed days, reacting to whatever came at me.

Now I realise: that wasn’t progress. That was noise.

Through thinking, I’ve created businesses, built a national community, and I’ll probably go on to build multiple more. That didn’t happen because I was chained to a desk, it happened because I gave myself the freedom to think.

What Happens In The Brain

Here’s the science: when we stop doing tasks, the brain doesn’t go quiet, it switches to the Default Mode Network. That’s the system that lights up when you’re daydreaming, walking, or even in the shower. It’s where your brain connects ideas and solves problems behind the scenes, it happens to us all.

Psychologists call this the “incubation effect”, when you step away from a problem, the answer often appears later, seemingly out of nowhere. You know that moment when you say - "I have a great business idea", Yep, that's the zone we are talking about.

The opposite is also true. If your brain is flooded with emails, meetings, and constant noise, you literally don’t have the bandwidth to think strategically. Busyness starves creativity.

Thinking vs Procrastination

It’s important to draw a line here. Thinking is not procrastination.

Procrastination is avoiding a task. Thinking is exploring an idea and working out how to bring it to life. They might look the same from the outside, sitting there, not “doing” anything, but the outcomes couldn’t be more different.

One leaves you stuck. The other moves you forward.

Why Thinking Beats Busyness

Here’s the comparison I often make. You could pay me the same salary as a full-time Business Development Manager. I’d work one hour to their ten, and I’d still be ahead.

Why? Because progress doesn’t come from reactive work. It comes from strategic moves. And strategy comes from thinking.

Today, clients don't pay me to be busy, they pay me to think, that's the deal.

It’s taken me a long time to understand this, but now I see thinking time as non-negotiable. It’s as important as any other task.

Even Churchill used to take long walks to think. Einstein said imagination was more important than knowledge. The best minds in history protected time to think, because they knew it was where the real breakthroughs happen.

Making Space For It

Of course, the day-to-day work has to get done. Emails, calls, delivery, they all matter. But let’s be honest: a lot of meetings exist just to make people look busy.

That’s wasted space. And wasted space could be thinking time.

If you’re in a job and you need to justify it, frame it with your boss: “I need this downtime to think about how we grow.” Some will love that, some won’t. That’s their call. But if you want to be the person who moves things forward rather than just keeps the wheel spinning, you’ll need to protect that space for yourself.

The Challenge

So here’s my challenge to you: start small. Even 3 hours a week of true thinking time can change the way you work. No distractions. No fake busyness. Just thinking.

It might feel uncomfortable at first, because we’ve been conditioned to equate busyness with progress. But stick with it. Thinking is not doing nothing. Thinking is the work.

And once you start treating it that way, you’ll see just how far it can take you.

If you take time to think, drop your experience in the comments.

Much Love

Dan