Read Time:
Leadership Insights
There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that higher education leaders know well.
It’s not the exhaustion of hard work. It’s the exhaustion of response—of living in a constant state of “whatever comes up next.” The email arrives, you handle it. Someone stops by, you pivot. A colleague texts urgently, you drop what you’re doing. By the end of the day, you’ve been productive, but only in the most reactive sense:: You responded to everything. And still somehow nothing got done.
This is the reactive cycle. And for leaders in higher ed, it can feel like just part of the job. After all, you work in an environment where everyone reports to someone, everyone needs something, and the pace of institutional life can make everything feel like it needs an answer right now.
But most of it doesn’t.
Building a System That Protects Your Time
Urgency is a feeling before it’s a fact. Most requests feel urgent because they were sent urgently, or because someone is waiting, or because leaving something unanswered creates discomfort. Very few things are actually urgent in the sense of: if I don’t act on this now, something real will break.
Here are two tools that can help you sort what sounds urgent from what actually is:
Response Filters: A simple set of criteria you use before responding to any non-emergency request. A useful starting point: Does this connect to one of my top priorities this week? What’s the actual cost of responding tomorrow instead of right now?
The 24-Hour Rule: For requests that aren’t clearly time-sensitive, give yourself permission to wait. Respond within 24 hours, but not in the next 10 minutes. You’ll often find that the urgency resolves on its own or that a more thoughtful response was worth the wait.
The goal isn’t to be less responsive. It’s to be intentionally responsive, choosing when to act rather than by reacting to whoever asked last.
Pause & Reflect
At the end of today, take two minutes to estimate how your time actually split: What percentage was spent on work you planned versus work that arrived uninvited? No judgment—just a number.
Do this for three days in a row. You don’t need a perfect system, just a rough honest estimate. Over time, the pattern becomes hard to ignore, and once you can see it clearly, you can start to shift it.
To go deeper on building proactive rhythms, try working through it with Sophia, our AI leadership coach.