Making time to step away for learning rarely feels neutral. It often feels heavy.
Not because learning lacks value – you know exactly how important it is – but because learning competes with a reality that never pauses. Production continues. Questions from the work floor keep coming. Machines run, batches move, colleagues turn to you for decisions – even when you’re not there – and people are waiting. And life at home simply goes on.
Stepping away for a multi-day production course, a consulting trajectory, or an in-depth training programme therefore doesn’t feel like adding something to your agenda. It feels like creating absence – and absence has consequences.
It takes courage to step away.
Before going any further, let’s be clear about one thing: We can’t give you more time. And we can’t teach you how to magically “create” it either. Time is elusive. You can’t see it, hear it or hold it. You mostly notice it when it’s missing.
This article explores why time is often the hardest argument when it comes to learning, and why that argument is both understandable and, at times, misleading.
Time is never neutral
We often speak about time as if it were something we could find.
But time is never empty. For many people, it is always already allocated – to people, processes, responsibilities and expectations. When someone says they “don’t have time,” what they usually mean is that everything else already has a claim.
Learning rarely arrives with urgency. It doesn’t shout like a child at home. It doesn’t demand immediate action the way a colleague or a production issue does. And that makes it easy to postpone – even when we know it matters.
The paradox is that the more responsibility someone carries, the harder it becomes to step away. Leaders, production managers, founders and experienced professionals often feel this most acutely. Their presence solves problems. Their absence feels like it creates new ones – more questions, more expectations, fuller inboxes. When you already feel stretched, choosing “more of that” is hardly appealing. The challenge is that the urgent never stops knocking.
The paradox of being busy
Many professionals like you operate at full capacity for long periods of time.
Your days are filled with interruptions and responsibilities that don’t politely wait their turn: knocks on the door on the work floor, small issues on the production line that need immediate attention – or calls about funding files, coordination with partners, searching for the right collaborators, aligning expectations across teams. Add to that supplier calls, evaluations, follow-ups, and continuous problem-solving.
Conversations don’t end when the workday ends.
Decisions follow you home.
Responsibility stretches well beyond official working hours.
And paradoxically, it is often in this exact phase – when everything already feels full – that you feel the need for learning most clearly.
Not because you have spare time.
But because you need clarity, perspective and better decisions.
Stepping away at that moment can feel counterintuitive. Yet it is often the only way to regain overview, challenge assumptions, and avoid repeating the same patterns – patterns that keep things moving, but not necessarily forward.
Why stepping away can create time
The idea that learning “costs time” is logical – but incomplete.
Learning does not change time in any abstract or theoretical sense. It simply shifts how time is used. It moves time away from repeated trial‑and‑error, corrective action and firefighting, toward better initial decisions and deeper understanding.
Participants rarely describe this as an immediate gain. More often, they notice it gradually:
- fewer recurring problems
- faster recognition of root causes
- more confidence in complex decisions
- less need to revisit the same questions
In that sense, stepping away for several days does not remove time from the system. It can prevent much larger time losses later on.
Time pressure rarely comes from work alone
Stepping away for a course doesn’t just affect your agenda – it affects the people around you.
You’re not the one bringing your son to piano lessons that week.
You don’t pick up your daughter after karate.
Someone else has to step in, reorganise schedules, carry the load.
And maybe this week, you don’t visit your mother whose memory is slowly fading – and yes, she will notice your absence.
What makes this difficult is not the time itself.
It’s the responsibility.
The awareness that by stepping away, you are asking someone else to carry what you usually hold.
These are not side notes. They are real and valid parts of the hesitation.
Choosing to invest in a course is therefore never just a professional decision.
It is a personal one – shaped by care, responsibility, and the people you don’t want to let down.
Knowing is not the same as making space
This tension between knowing what matters and actually making space for it has been explored for decades. It reflects a form of practical wisdom that remains deeply relevant – and well worth discovering, or rediscovering.
Stephen Covey, whose book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People has shaped thinking on leadership and effectiveness across generations, articulated it clearly in his Habit 3: “Put First Things First.” At its core, it describes the gap between recognising what is important and giving it priority in daily practice.
Covey went a step further by distinguishing between what feels urgent and what is truly important. Urgent matters demand immediate attention. Important matters create lasting impact – but rarely insist on being handled today.
In a production context, that gap is easy to recognise. You may know that deeper understanding, better systems or improved processes will make a real difference – and still find your days largely consumed by responding to what shouts the loudest: immediate issues, follow-ups and decisions that demand attention now.
The difficulty is rarely a lack of insight. It lies in how easily what demands action in the moment crowds out what creates impact over time.
When insight needs space
There is an old and often-told story about insight that illustrates this from a different angle.
Archimedes did not solve his problem while actively working on it, but while stepping away. Relaxed in a bath, allowing his mind to wander, he arrived at the famous “Eureka” moment that led to the discovery of buoyancy.
Not because he tried harder.
But because he created the conditions for a different kind of thinking.
This is not a romantic anecdote about genius. It points to something very practical: complex understanding rarely emerges under constant pressure. It needs moments of distance, slowness and safety – moments where attention is no longer fully claimed by immediate demands.
Learning experiences can work in a similar way. They temporarily interrupt the rhythm of action to allow patterns to surface, assumptions to be questioned and connections to be made. Not despite stepping away – but because of it.
Side reflection – We often say that time is money. And yet, we give away time far more easily than we give away money – scrolling, working around broken systems, or sticking with recipes we already know could be improved.
Seneca, one of the great Stoic philosophers, observed this centuries ago: life is not short, he argued – we simply waste much of it. When time is handled with care, it expands. When it is scattered, it disappears.
Perhaps the real question is not whether we are busy – but what we are busy with, and whether it truly deserves our time.
A reflection, not a prescription
This reflection is not an argument for always stepping away, nor a call to ignore operational reality.
It is an invitation to look more closely at the role time plays in our decisions around learning and growing – and to recognise that hesitation often comes from responsibility, not from indifference.
This article is part of a reflection series on why saying yes to learning is often harder than it seems.
In a broader reflection series, we explore other reasons people hesitate to say yes to learning – including cost, experience and the discomfort that depth can bring.
Not to convince. Not to persuade. But to better understand the complexity behind decisions that are often reduced to simple explanations.
Best regards,
Lieselotte Verweirder
Director Mycelia Academy
January 2026