The afternoon walk as a business decision

I keep meeting founders who apologise for their afternoon walks, as if standing up were an indulgence. I want to make a small case that the walk is one of the highest-leverage things on my calendar.

There is a particular kind of guilty look that people who work for themselves get when you ask them what they did between two and three in the afternoon. It is the look of someone who has just remembered they went outside for a little while, and is a little bit ashamed of it, because outside is not work, and work is what they were supposed to have been doing.

I want, in this small essay, to make an unfashionable claim: the afternoon walk is one of the highest-leverage things on my calendar. Not "self-care." Not "recharging." A business decision, in the same category as sending an invoice or answering a client email. It sits in that column because of what it does to the rest of the day, and to the quality of the sentences I write when I sit back down.

What happens on the walk

Nothing dramatic. I walk for about forty minutes, mostly along the same three streets, mostly without headphones. I do not "think about the problem." I do not carry a notebook. I let my brain do the thing brains do when nobody is telling them what to look at — which is to shuffle, quietly, through everything I put into it in the morning, and to hand me, unrequested, small pieces of clarity.

Some of what I get on these walks is useless: fragments of song lyrics, memories of embarrassments from 2011, the sense that I should probably buy more olive oil. But some of it is very useful, and would have been unavailable to me had I stayed at my desk and gritted my teeth. This is the important part. The walk is not a substitute for thinking. It is the second half of a thought that started at nine in the morning.

The walk is not a substitute for thinking. It is the second half of a thought.

The economics, briefly

An hour of my time, from a business point of view, has a price. So does the walk. But the walk is not a cost line — it is an investment line. If forty minutes outside gives me even one usable insight per week — one better sentence in a client proposal, one clearer decision about which piece of work to say no to — the ROI, as we say when we want to feel serious, is absurd.

I mention this because I have found that the language of ROI is sometimes the only language that gets past the guilt. If "I need a break" doesn't land, "this is an investment in the quality of my next four hours" often will. Both are true; only one of them survives in a founder's brain.

How to protect it

Three small rules I use:

• The walk is on the calendar, as an event, with a start and end time.
• It happens whether I feel like it or not. Especially when I don't.
• No podcast, no phone call, no notes app. If something important arrives, it will still be there in forty minutes.

That's the whole essay. If you have been quietly cutting your afternoon walk to signal seriousness, this is my small case for putting it back.