Proper Pacing

This is tool 8 of the Approach Toolkit – A collection of insights around sustainable delivery, covering balanced planning, realistic commitments, built-in recovery time, contingency, and honest expectation-setting.

What is it?

Up to this point, the approach toolkit has been focused on uncovering detail, forming plans, and building both the confidence and motivation needed to take action. This is all essential groundwork for efficient, speedy execution — but with all this proactivity and positive focus, it can be very easy to get a little carried away.

The Proper Pacing tool is written for people like me who can get a little too excited and push a bit too hard in pursuit of their goals.

So, what is it? A collection of insights and principles to help you find balance in your approach, so that your effort becomes sustainable over the long term rather than an unsustainable burst that leads to burnout. It is worth noting that this is a choice you get to revisit frequently — sometimes that burst of effort is exactly what the moment requires.

Remember: in order to say yes to one thing, you must say no to something else. That is simply how life works. The insights in this tool are designed to help you distribute those choices wisely.

How does it work?

Let’s get straight in to the insights…

Balanced planning

The instinct when facing a complex challenge is to attack everything at once — to push on all fronts simultaneously in the hope of making rapid progress across the board. In practice, this approach tends to produce the opposite effect. Energy becomes diluted, context-switching slows everything down, and it can quickly feel as though progress is happening everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

The antidote is compartmentalisation: the deliberate choice to focus your energy on one specific area at a time, make meaningful progress there, and then move on. This does not mean ignoring everything else — it means being intentional about where your primary effort sits at any given moment.

When planning, resist the temptation to push every workstream forward simultaneously. Sequence where you can, stagger where you must, and protect the focus of your team by giving them clear sight of what the current priority is. Concentrated effort consistently outperforms distributed effort — and it is far kinder on the people doing the work.

Don’t sign up without commitment

Deadlines are important. They create healthy pressure, sharpen focus, and give the team something to orient around. But there is a meaningful difference between a deadline that has been agreed and a deadline that has simply been imposed.

When dates are set without the input of the people responsible for delivering the work, you risk creating a plan that looks credible on paper but lacks the genuine buy-in needed to make it real. People will work to a deadline they helped shape. They will quietly doubt one that was handed to them.

Before any commitment is made externally, take the time to sense-check it with your team. Can they genuinely see a path to hitting that date? Are the dependencies manageable? Are the assumptions reasonable? If the answer to any of these is uncertain, that uncertainty needs to be surfaced before the commitment is locked in — not after. A deadline everyone believes in is worth far more than one that nobody questions out loud but privately doubts.

Cheat days

Sustained delivery requires rhythm, and rhythm requires rest. It is easy to treat downtime as a luxury — something to be earned once the hard work is done — but this thinking is self-defeating. Without structured recovery built into the plan, the hard work never quite feels done, and the team runs progressively hotter until something gives.

The practical answer is to deliberately factor unstructured time into your planning cycle. Aim for at least once a fortnight, and once a month as a minimum. This time is not idle — it is purposeful. Use it for the necessary housekeeping that always gets deprioritised when pace is high: clearing backlogs, updating documentation, having the conversations that keep getting deferred, and simply giving people the space to breathe and reset.

A natural way to build this in is by extending the time around a retrospective session — a moment already designed for reflection. Give it a little more room, let the team decompress, and treat it as an investment in the pace that follows rather than a cost to it. (More on retrospectives in the Agile Mind tool.)

Contingency

Every plan contains assumptions. Some of those assumptions will prove correct. Some will not. The gap between what you planned and what actually happens is where contingency lives — and the teams that plan for it are the ones that absorb the unexpected without losing their footing.

The first step is honesty: be clear, with yourself and with your stakeholders, about what you know and what you are assuming. These are not the same thing, and treating them as equivalent is one of the most common sources of planning overconfidence. Where assumptions exist, risk exists — and that risk deserves time in your plan.

As a rule, the less certainty you have about a piece of work, the more buffer you should build around it. This does not mean padding timelines indiscriminately — it means being deliberate about where the genuine unknowns sit and protecting those areas accordingly. A plan with honest contingency built in is not a weak plan. It is a trustworthy one.

Being realistic

Deadlines and ambition are valuable — they create the tension that drives delivery forward. But ambition has to be grounded in reality, and the further a plan strays from what is genuinely achievable, the more damage it can do.

The risk is rarely that a team sets out to make an unrealistic commitment. It is that assumptions accumulate quietly in the background — each one individually defensible, but collectively creating a plan that only works if everything goes right. When too many assumptions are sitting beneath a deadline, that deadline is no longer a target. It is a bet.

Before locking in a commitment, take stock of the assumptions underpinning it. How many are there? How confident are you in each one? If the plan requires most of them to hold, it is worth pausing to ask whether the date should be adjusted, the scope reduced, or the assumptions themselves tested before the commitment is made. Pressure is useful. Pressure built on an unstable foundation is not.

Benefits and Practical Applications

Proper Pacing is a tool you can return to at any point in a delivery — not just at the start. Its value is not in applying all five insights simultaneously, but in knowing they exist and reaching for the right one when the moment calls for it.

The most immediate benefit is protection — of your team, your plan, and ultimately your results. Burnout is one of the most common and least acknowledged causes of delivery failure. It rarely announces itself. It accumulates quietly, through too many consecutive sprints, too many unmet commitments, and too little space to recover. The insights in this tool are designed to interrupt that pattern before it takes hold.

The second benefit is credibility. A leader who sets a realistic pace, builds in contingency, and secures genuine commitment before signing up to a deadline is a leader whose plans people trust. Over time, that trust compounds. Teams lean in rather than hedge. Stakeholders back you rather than scrutinise you. The reputation you build for delivering what you commit to is worth far more than the short-term impression made by an ambitious deadline that slips.

Like Expand to Contract, the power of this tool increases once it becomes shared language. When your team understands the principles behind Proper Pacing, they become active participants in maintaining it rather than passive recipients of a pace someone else has set. That shift — from compliance to ownership — is where sustainable delivery actually lives.

Use this tool honestly. If you find yourself skipping the contingency, shortcutting the commitment conversation, or cancelling the cheat days because things are too busy, those are precisely the moments the tool is designed for. The busier things feel, the more important it becomes to pause and ask whether the pace you are setting is one you can actually sustain.