Is slowing down really more productive, or just a way to rationalize doing less?

It's genuinely more productive when the pause is used to set direction and catch problems, not to avoid work. Sophie Devonshire's pauses are active and purposeful — premortems, midpoint checks, reflection that resets direction. The productivity gain comes from not wasting effort on the wrong target and from catching issues early. A pause used to procrastinate is different from a strategic pause used to think. The distinction is intention: one delays the work, the other makes the work that follows far more effective.

How long should a strategic pause be?

It depends entirely on the decision in front of you. Sophie Devonshire took roughly three months to set her direction after a major life move, but she also builds in pauses that last only minutes — before, during, and after a project. A career-defining choice may warrant weeks; a project kickoff needs only a brief premortem. The key isn't the duration but the intention and structure: enough time to genuinely think and reset direction, deliberately set aside rather than squeezed in by accident.

How do I take a strategic pause when I'm too busy to stop?

Start with micro-pauses that fit inside your existing work rather than waiting for a clear window that never comes. Sophie Devonshire's approach embeds short pauses into the flow of projects — a few minutes for a premortem, a midpoint checkpoint, a quick post-project review. You can also use existing markers, like the start of a week or a quarter, to reflect. The point is that strategic pausing isn't a luxury that requires free time; it's a habit you weave into the work you're already doing.

What's the difference between networking and building a tribe?

Networking is often transactional — collecting contacts for what they can do for you — while building a tribe means forming genuine relationships and community. Sophie Devonshire's guidance to 'build friends, not just contacts' captures it: people sense the difference, and authentic connections are the ones that endure and eventually open doors. A tribe is built through real interest in others' stories and through giving as much as you ask, over time. It's the difference between a list of names and a network of people who actually want to help you.

How do I make pausing a habit instead of a one-time event?

Anchor pauses to recurring markers and structures so they happen automatically. Sophie Devonshire ties reflection to the new year and the year's midpoint, sets goals, and reviews them monthly for accountability. Embedding premortems and post-project reviews into how you run work makes pausing part of the process rather than an extra task. The trick is to remove the decision: when a pause is scheduled or built into a workflow, you no longer have to summon the willpower to take it each time.

Why is celebrating progress important for high performers?

Because relentless drive without acknowledgment quietly erodes motivation and tips into self-criticism. Sophie Devonshire notes that driven people are wired to keep pushing and that a growth mindset rightly says 'not there yet' — but without deliberate moments to recognize how far you've come, that mindset becomes a source of grief rather than fuel. Pausing to celebrate wins also reveals genuine progress that constant forward motion hides, which renews energy and hope. For high performers, celebrating progress isn't indulgence; it's maintenance for sustainable pace.

Can taking strategic pauses help a whole team, not just an individual?

Yes. When a leader pauses to set direction, they can align the entire team and move faster together with less wasted effort. Sophie Devonshire's micro-pauses — premortems, midpoint checks, post-project reviews — are inherently team practices that surface risks, course-correct, and capture lessons collectively. Reframing these as strategic pauses also gives a team psychological permission to think rather than just react. Embedded across a group, the habit replaces a frantic, reactive culture with a more deliberate rhythm that improves both decisions and morale.

Why Slowing Down Helps You Get More Done

Slowing down helps you get more done because deliberate pauses let you choose the right direction before you accelerate — so your effort isn't wasted on the wrong work. The most effective leaders build in small, strategic pauses: a quick premortem before a project, a checkpoint at the midpoint, and a review immediately after while the feedback is fresh. These moments create momentum instead of a nonstop scramble, and they give you the rarest resource a busy person has — time to think. Reframed as a "strategic pause" rather than "stopping," slowing down becomes the fastest route forward.

For ambitious people, slowing down feels counterintuitive, even threatening. The whole identity of a high performer is built on speed, output, and momentum, so any suggestion to stop reads as falling behind. Sophie Devonshire understands that instinct better than most — she calls herself an "impatient accelerator." As CEO of The Marketing Society and the best-selling author of Superfast: Lead at Speed, she has spent a career studying pace, and she's built and sold her own company and led brands at Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola. Her conclusion is the one driven people most need to hear: the leaders who move fastest are usually the ones who pause on purpose. What follows is a practical guide to using strategic pauses — the large ones that reshape a career and the small daily ones almost everyone overlooks.

Key Takeaways

Slowing down sets direction, not just speed. A pause lets you confirm you're heading the right way before you pour in effort.
Language matters: reframe "stopping" as a "strategic pause." Ambitious people resist stopping but embrace a deliberate pause to think.
Micro-pauses build momentum. A premortem, a midpoint checkpoint, and immediate post-project feedback compound over time.
The in-between is a gift. Periods between roles are prime opportunities to learn, absorb, and build your network.
Build friends, not just contacts. Genuine relationships, formed before you need them, are the real engine of opportunity.
Schedule pauses rather than waiting for burnout. Use natural markers — a new year, a midpoint — to reflect, reset direction, and celebrate progress.
Careers are squiggly, not linear. Pauses and pivots aren't detours from success; they're often how it actually happens.

Reframe "Stopping" as a Strategic Pause

One of Devonshire's sharpest insights is about psychology and word choice. Tell a driven person to "stop," and something in them rebels — it sounds like quitting, like losing ground. The fix isn't more willpower; it's a reframe rooted in how we actually respond to language.

"As soon as you reframe it as a pause to think, the power of that is brilliant."

The same break, relabeled, becomes permission rather than failure. When Devonshire first moved overseas to the Middle East, she gave herself roughly three months to work out where she was going and what she wanted to do next. She didn't call it downtime, a gap, or unemployment. She treated it as a strategic pause to think — and that framing transformed an anxious in-between period into one of the most generative stretches of her career.

This is more than semantics. It's a way to give yourself, and your team, the psychological room to reflect without the guilt that high achievers attach to inactivity. A "strategic pause" sounds like leadership. "Stopping" sounds like surrender. The work is the same; the permission is entirely different.

The Micro-Pauses That Build Momentum

Not every pause is a sabbatical or a career move. Some of Devonshire's most practical advice concerns the tiny, deliberate pauses she builds into ordinary work — and the evidence behind why they help. She structures them around three moments.

Before a project — the premortem. "Let's just do a premortem," she says. "Let's work out what's going to go wrong." Imagining failure in advance surfaces risks while you can still prevent them.
At the halfway point — the checkpoint. A deliberate pause midway lets you confirm whether you're on track and adjust before it's too late.
Immediately after — the fast feedback loop. Pausing right after you finish, while the experience is fresh, captures lessons that would otherwise evaporate.

Why the midpoint pause works

The halfway checkpoint draws on a well-documented behavioral pattern: people naturally tend to speed up after they pass the midpoint of a task. A deliberate pause there harnesses that surge rather than fighting it, sharpening momentum instead of killing it. Far from slowing her down, these built-in stops keep Devonshire off what she calls the constant roller coaster you can't get off — replacing a frantic, reactive rhythm with steady forward motion punctuated by moments to think. The premortem, in particular, echoes a respected decision-making technique used by high-stakes teams precisely because anticipating failure is one of the cheapest ways to avoid it.

Slow Down to Set Direction, Not Just Speed

The deeper reason pausing accelerates results is that speed in the wrong direction is just wasted energy. Devonshire frames the real payoff of a pause not as rest but as navigation.

"When you pause, you can work out not just how fast you want to go, but in what direction."

This reframes the entire "slow down to speed up" idea. The point of pausing isn't to do less; it's to ensure that the considerable effort you're about to expend is pointed at the right target. A leader who pauses can set direction for themselves and for their team — and then move quickly with confidence. Without that pause, you risk being busy, fast, and wrong, which is far more expensive than being deliberate. Businesses, she notes, need leadership that is both responsive — able to move fast on a crisis or an opportunity — and responsible, and being responsible nearly always requires some time to think first.

Use the In-Between as a Gift: How to Build Your Tribe

Some of Devonshire's most actionable wisdom comes from the unsettled period between roles — the kind of in-between most people rush to escape. She treats it instead as one of the best learning and relationship-building windows you'll get.

She references a concept she attributes to a former chief executive of General Electric — the idea of a "soak period," letting your brain genuinely absorb what's coming next before charging into a new role all guns blazing. Landing in a new country, she had what she calls the audacity to ask near-strangers who she should meet, and let one introduction lead to the next. She describes building her network — using a Middle Eastern term, wasta, for the kind of influence that comes from strong relationships — through dozens of conversations, the proverbial "hundred coffees."

The distinction she draws is the part worth keeping:

"Build friends, not just contacts."

People can sense the difference between genuine interest and transactional networking. When you connect over someone's actual stories rather than what you can extract from them, you build relationships that last — and that, years later, become the doors that open. She's candid that thoughtful, considerate people often feel guilty about asking for coffees and help, which worries her, because it leaves the field to the overconfident. Her reassurance is simple: most people genuinely like to help and to give back, so asking is not an imposition but an invitation.

She caps the point with an aphorism that reframes networking from a present-tense scramble into a long-term practice:

"The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The best time to build a network is five years ago."

The warning embedded there is that many people get so buried in the day-to-day of their jobs that they forget to keep refreshing their network — and only look up, too late, when they suddenly need it.

Schedule Your Pauses Instead of Waiting for Burnout

Perhaps the most important shift Devonshire advocates is moving from reactive pauses — the kind you take only when you've hit a wall — to proactive ones you build into your calendar. She uses the "artificial" nature of time markers deliberately, treating moments like the new year as useful constructs for reflection.

Each year she runs a structured look back and look forward, setting clear goals and then reviewing them monthly for accountability across her business and her own development. She also uses the midpoint of the year to ask how far she's come. There's something powerful, she notes, in the way progress drives pace: when you pause to look back, you see how much you've actually done, which fuels motivation — whereas constant forward motion only ever shows you the pile of work still ahead.

That's why she insists on celebrating wins and progress, not just chasing the next target. Driven people are wired to keep pushing, and a growth mindset rightly says you're "not there yet" — but without deliberate moments to acknowledge how far you've come, that same drive curdles into giving yourself grief. Scheduling pauses, she argues, builds a healthy rhythm: time to celebrate, time to reset direction, and time to think — so you don't have to wait for exhaustion to force the stop.

It also reframes the shape of a career. Devonshire's own path — from brand management to consultancy to founding and selling an e-commerce company to advising the C-suite to writing a book — is anything but linear. She points to the idea of "squiggly careers," and her own experience shows that the pauses and pivots weren't detours from success. They were how it happened.

Q & A

Why does slowing down help you get more done?

Slowing down helps you get more done by ensuring your effort is aimed in the right direction instead of just moving faster. Sophie Devonshire builds small pauses into every project — a premortem to surface what could go wrong, a midpoint checkpoint to confirm she's on track, and a quick review afterward while lessons are fresh. Because people naturally speed up after a midpoint, a deliberate pause there sharpens momentum rather than killing it. The result is steady progress with time to think, rather than a frantic scramble toward a target you never paused to verify.

What is a strategic pause?

A strategic pause is a deliberate, time-boxed break to think — reframed so ambitious people will actually take it. Sophie Devonshire points out that telling a driven leader to "stop" triggers resistance, but calling it a strategic pause turns the same break into permission to step back, absorb, and decide. It can be large, like the few months she took to set her direction after moving abroad, or small, like a few minutes before a meeting. The defining feature is intention: you're pausing on purpose to think, not stalling by accident.

How do you build a professional network when you're between jobs?

Treat the in-between period as a gift rather than a gap. Sophie Devonshire used a move to a new country to build her network from scratch, having the audacity to ask near-strangers who she should meet and letting each introduction lead to another. Her rule is to build friends, not just contacts — people sense the difference between genuine interest and transactional outreach. She also warns against waiting until you need a network to build one, citing the idea that the best time to start was years ago, so keep meeting new people while you're settled.

What is a premortem and how do you use it?

A premortem is a planning exercise where, before starting a project, you imagine it has already failed and work backward to identify what went wrong. Sophie Devonshire builds it into her process — "let's work out what's going to go wrong" — so risks surface while there's still time to prevent them. Unlike optimistic planning, it deliberately invites worst-case thinking, which research-backed decision-making approaches use to reduce blind spots. Run it as a quick team pause at the outset: list plausible failure points, then adjust the plan to guard against the most likely ones.

How can leaders avoid burnout while still moving fast?

Schedule pauses proactively instead of waiting until exhaustion forces one. Sophie Devonshire uses natural markers — the new year, the midpoint of the year — to look back, reset direction, and set goals she reviews monthly. She stresses celebrating wins and progress, not only chasing the next target, because acknowledging how far you've come sustains motivation that relentless forward motion erodes. The combination — built-in reflection, a clear direction, and deliberate recognition of progress — lets leaders maintain pace without the constant scramble that leads to burnout.

What does "slow down to speed up" actually mean?

It means that pausing to set the right direction makes your subsequent speed far more productive than rushing without thinking. Sophie Devonshire's framing is that a pause lets you work out not just how fast you want to go, but in what direction — and speed in the wrong direction is wasted effort. Leaders who pause can align themselves and their teams, then move quickly with confidence. So "slowing down" isn't about doing less; it's an upfront investment in clarity that prevents the far costlier mistake of being busy, fast, and wrong.

Why are careers rarely linear, and is that a problem?

Careers are often "squiggly" — full of shifts, pivots, and pauses — and that's frequently how real success unfolds, not a deviation from it. Sophie Devonshire's own path moved through brand management, consultancy, founding and selling a company, advising executives, and writing a book. Each pause and pivot opened opportunities a straight line wouldn't have. The reframe matters because people often judge non-linear paths harshly; in practice, the willingness to pause, absorb, and change direction is what lets a career adapt and grow over time.

How to Apply This Today

Rename your next break. Call it a "strategic pause to think" rather than stopping, and notice how that single reframe lowers the guilt and resistance.
Add three micro-pauses to your next project. Run a five-minute premortem at the start, a checkpoint at the halfway mark, and a fast review the moment it ends.
Pause for direction before speed. Before your next big push, spend ten minutes confirming you're aimed at the right target, not just moving quickly.
Have one genuine coffee. Reach out to someone with real curiosity about their story — build a friend, not a contact — before you need anything from them.
Put a reflection date on the calendar. Schedule a look-back/look-forward session, and list the wins you've already earned so progress, not just the to-do list, drives your pace.

Common Mistakes People Make

Treating any pause as falling behind. Refusing to stop because it feels like losing ground keeps you fast but undirected.
Confusing motion with progress. Speed in the wrong direction is wasted effort, however impressive the activity looks.
Skipping the premortem. Diving into a project without asking what could go wrong forfeits the cheapest risk prevention available.
Building a network only when you need one. Transactional, last-minute outreach is far weaker than relationships formed steadily over time.
Waiting for burnout to pause. Relying on exhaustion to force a stop means the pause comes as a crisis instead of a choice.
Never celebrating progress. Always chasing the next target without acknowledging wins turns healthy drive into self-criticism.

The Bottom Line

Speed and reflection aren't opposites. Sophie Devonshire's career — across continents, companies, and a business she built and sold — turned on pauses she took on purpose, and her core message reframes the instinct most ambitious people fight: the leaders who get furthest aren't the ones who never stop, but the ones who stop long enough to make sure they're pointed the right way.

You don't need a sabbatical to start. Rename your next break a strategic pause, build a premortem and a midpoint check into your next project, and reach out to one person this week to build a friend rather than a contact. Schedule the reflection you've been postponing, and let yourself acknowledge how far you've already come. Slowing down, done deliberately, isn't the cost of moving fast — it's what makes moving fast actually worth it.

Why Slowing Down Helps You Get More Done (and How to Take a Strategic Pause)