Almost a year ago I visited Hong Kong for a week. Amazing, bustling place where East meets West, but people still seem to find time to relax during their busy day – for example, doing Tai Chi in the evening in the public gardens around the base of a high-rise building.
 
I bought an indoor garden water fountain in a ceramic jar in a district of Hong Kong (still near the centre) full of garden and plant shops, because it looked good and was a bit unusual. It sits in our kitchen and was largely ignored for a while. However I’ve now found an interesting way of using it to make some time at the start of a busy day to think and reflect. At breakfast, instead of rushing and watching the (mostly depressing) TV news, I put on the water feature instead of the TV and listen to its small fountain bubble away while I eat. It reminds me of Hong Kong and lets me think more calmly and put the day ahead in perspective.
 
Finding this thinking time is a challenge when we are bombarded in our professional working life these days with information, work requests, news, professional updates, advertising and promotion of all sorts by phone, email, IM, Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Instagram and so on.  
 
Don’t get me wrong I think these are all potentially valuable services and I use many of them, but they create a sort of continuous background roar which can make it difficult to navigate through the complex issues that arise in any working day.
 
And there are many ways to find strategic thinking time – once the need for it is consciously acknowledged – this article by Laura Vanderkam, the author of several time management and productivity books, suggests some ideas for busy people to do this.
 
It also does not have to be time spent alone. I recall one deadlocked negotiation in a central London hotel where the lawyers were at loggerheads and their clients in total disagreement. The chief executive of our client called a halt and took his opposite number for a half hour walk in Hyde Park. This change of scenery gave them time to calm down, consider the problem from a different angle – and come up with an innovative solution both sides were happy with – but which we would never have thought of in the heat of the negotiation battle.
 
Gary Kasparov the grand master sums it up nicely in the context of chess. The worst enemy of the strategist is the clock. Time trouble… Reduces us all to pure reflex and reaction, tactical play. Emotion and instinct cloud our strategic vision when there is no time for proper evaluation.

​This week I had the pleasure of attending the ITechLaw international IT conference in Stockholm Sweden and the honour of speaking there. Several people thanked me for speaking and a few said, to my great surprise, that they had been inspired to work on IT outsourcing contracting by talks I had given at previous conferences.
 
I was quite taken aback and it made me think how each of us in our daily working lives can unconsciously be an inspiration to other professionals, without necessarily setting out to do so. Indeed, I suspect if we did it just would not work.
 
I remember as a young lawyer observing the senior partner from a leading London law firm participating in the first European bond issue in the service industry. He was only standing in for his regular partner for some reason. It was all very intense with negotiations going late into the night. I first met him in the foyer of the merchant bank reading the Times, looking very relaxed and as if for all of the world as if he was coming to a networking breakfast. However, this was a very misleading impression – he had a very sharp intellect.
 
We were adapting standard documentation most of which was taken as read. This new lawyer quite calmly and carefully refused to accept this. He kept surprising the other (very seasoned) corporate finance lawyers in the room by pointing out that some complex provision or other just did not work in this new context. They huffed and puffed but almost invariably he was right. He wouldn’t accept that what he was being shown was necessarily correct and insisted on looking at it from first principles. There is a word that describes his approach – sapiential – containing, exhibiting or providing wisdom.
 
He inspired me to take a calm and collected approach to negotiation always questioning what is presented in a draft. He could never have been aware he had this effect.
 
I think this is something about recognising that we are part of joined up professions and that we can and should influence and learn from each other. Mother Teresa said: “I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the water to create many ripples.”
 
And it is also why taking the time to physically attend a conference or other event provides an opportunity to step away from the daily pressures of clients, customers or patients and find out what others think or do – either in formal sessions or in networking breaks.
 
Maybe the key is being prepared to take the time to be out there and to look and participate, getting away from the desk or the laptop and listening and talking and sharing. Mark Twain summed this up: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
 

In today’s professional and business world driven by digital developments which immerse us in multiple means of communicating with each other we are constantly pressed to make decisions. Information comes at us thick and fast on different media and we are asked to respond, advise, attend a meeting or take some form of action as quickly as possible.
 
Time it seems is the enemy of the successful. Rapid fire choices and decisions are called for. We are pressured to respond instantly on everything – which tends to blur what matters from the mundane - meaning tasks which are unimportant in the grand scheme of things are given equal weight or even prioritised over key activities.
 
The lawman Wyatt Earp said Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything. In a gun fight... You need to take your time in a hurry.
 
I remember a partner in a law firm who when you asked him a complex question would randomly respond at first with some generalisation about the weather or something. I thought for a while he was mad, but then I realised that he was giving himself time to think. And sure enough he would suddenly come back on topic with an excellent response. A bit disconcerting but for him it worked. He had found a way of taking his time.
 
The American business historian Nancy Koehn said of Abraham Lincoln that When the stakes were really high and the emotions around an issue were charged, Lincoln often did nothing in the heat of the moment.
 
I read somewhere the when Winston Churchill was very angry or exercised about something or somebody he would dictate a very fierce emotional letter, but then wait until the next day before sending it, by which time he had calmed down and often would not send it at all.
 
Harder to do these days with an IM or an email, but on the other hand why not Pause before pressing send and go and have a coffee and then read your response again – often you can improve it or maybe find a better way of achieving what you want.
 
Of course there are times when speed of response is essential but that does not always mean rushing. I rather like this quote from G K Chesterton “One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.”
 

​For the uninitiated in yachting circles Fife Yacht Builders (three generations of the same family) made classic yachts from 1803 to 1939 in Fairlie, Scotland. Wally is a much more modern yacht builder based in Monte Carlo famous for the sleek, minimalist design which also typifies modern racing yachts.
 
I have been on holiday in the Gulf of St Tropez this week and am privileged to have witnessed the Voiles de St Tropez regatta which has 300 yachts participating with an incredible mix of classic boats and the latest state of the art racing yachts. They both co-exist side by side in St Tropez harbour before and after racing and provide a sense of history as well as sailing drama.
 
What particularly struck me watching the very different types of sailing yachts returning to port was that what made the regatta was this very diversity. A Scottish bagpiper played aboard one of the classic yachts as it arrived back in harbour, while we watched the professional crews of moored modern yachts way up the mast cleaning the carbon fibre masts and cross trees ready for the next day’s racing.
 
This diversity of old and young set the tone for the yachting event and reminds me (returning to a theme I explored in July) how important this sort of diversity is in the work place. Some organisations only seem to recognise one or other – youth or experience. They either go for and promote thirty somethings to high office very quickly or everybody who matters is older.
 
Age diversity is about accepting and benefitting from different age categories in an organisation. Not that it is all plain sailing. Even the boats in St Tropez raced in different categories reflecting their diverse performance. This (quite old) article Dueling Age Groups in Today’s Workforce; From Baby Boomers to Generations X and Y from Wharton University of Pennsylvania discusses how If it is hard to get people from various generations to reach any agreement, it is even harder to do so within a corporation.
 
But I suggest that it is definitely worth it in the same way that at the regatta different generations of yachts made the whole event. Everybody benefits. I like this quote from the American physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.
 
Each generation of yachts and workers brings something different and valuable to the party.