One of the most common complaints I hear from leaders and most folks working in startups or hypergrowth companies is that they simply don’t have enough time to get things done.
“I wish I had more time.”
“If only there were 25 hours in a day.”
“I just need to execute faster.”
“I wish I had more time with my family.”
Frankly, I understand the sentiment. Having been a single mom of three for over sixteen years while working in tech, and managing growing teams focused on hitting critical targets while “building the plane in flight,” I wished I had more time too. Heck, I wished I had clones of myself - but we’ll leave that discussion for another day.
What I want to point out is that yes, we think we need more time. The pain is real.
But I don’t think we actually have a time problem. I think we have a theft problem.
Something is insidiously stealing the value of our minutes, hours, and days. It happens so gradually and so consistently that we barely notice it. By noon our 24-hour day behaves like an 18-hour day. By Friday it feels like a 12-hour week.
Nothing happened to time.
Something is just stealing its value.
It’s kinda like inflation. One dollar used to buy a bom diggity slice of pizza in NYC. Now we’re lucky if it buys half an apple. The dollar still exists. Its purchasing power changed.
Time works the same way.
Maybe one uninterrupted hour of work would allow you to create a strategic presentation, write a draft blog post, or produce forty lines of functional code. Now interrupt that hour twelve times.
You still had sixty minutes, right?
But those sixty minutes no longer produce what they were capable of producing before. The quantity of time never changed. Its productive purchasing power did.
So, if time isn’t disappearing, what is happening?
What do we call this invisible thief?
Actually there are two thieves. The first is when the actual task is the wrong one. Work that doesn’t move you toward the outcome you’re trying to achieve. It’s the “what” you’re working on. That usually stems from not seeing clearly. And that theft happens when there’s a lack of clarity.
You could be working on something, beautifully - but it’s the wrong thing to work on. It doesn’t get you closer to your goal. Priorities weren’t clear, goals weren’t clear, so the choice of task doesn’t align with where you really need to go. Even if you execute this thing flawlessly, if it doesn’t get you closer to where you need to be, it steals the value of your time.
The second thief is “how” the theft happens when you’re doing the work. It’s the mechanism that gets in your way, quietly sucking the value out of your time, making you feel like you don’t have enough of it when in reality, it’s just costing you more to do something. This theft happens when there’s friction in how things get done.
In simplest terms, friction is any force that resists motion. It slows or impedes movement, progress, or operation.
Friction shows up anytime something is trying to move forward. A conversation, a project, a decision. Something resists that movement so more effort is required, progress slows, and time seemingly diminishes.
We can think of organizational friction as any resistance that causes work to require more time, energy, attention, or coordination than necessary. Because sometimes friction doesn’t slow work. It can cause rework, increase stress, lower quality, delay decisions, create conflict, or burn people out. The common denominator is that the cost of progress increases. And when the cost of progress increases, the value you extract from time decreases.
Different symptoms, same outcome. Work just becomes more expensive.
Friction can show up as unnecessary meetings, context switching, bureaucracy, unempowered accountability, unresolved conflict, decision fatigue, perfectionism, unclear goals, lack of protocol, saying yes too often, or even not having hard conversations.
You wake up with 24 hours.
Imagine every task you take on has an ideal cost.
For example, write a proposal = 2 hours. Make decision = 15 minutes.
Now introduce friction.
Unclear goals - Bam! Now it’s 4 hours.
Unclear ownership - Bam! Now it’s 8 hours.
Political discussion - Bam! Now it’s 5 days.
Nothing changed about the task. The cost changed. Lack of clarity and friction entered the system and quietly stole what every minute is capable of producing.
Over time, both begin to compound, but in different ways. A lack of clarity quietly pulls your attention toward work that doesn’t meaningfully move you toward your intended outcome. And friction quietly makes the right work harder than it needs to be.
For you personally, it might look like doubt, perfectionism, indecision, or avoidance for example, which gets in the way of you finishing that strategy doc you thought you could deliver in a few hours.
For your team or organization, it looks like bureaucracy, misalignment, unclear ownership, micromanagement, duplicated work, or constant rework, which creeps into your execution like an anti-magnetic force adding space and time between deliverables, people, and outputs.
Each instance seems small on its own. But together they create leaks. Not of time, but of capacity. Your organization slowly loses its ability to execute with the speed, clarity, and confidence it once may have had.
The worst part is that friction doesn’t announce itself. It hides in the ordinary. In the normalized. It’s in the meeting everyone assumes is necessary, the approval that’s “just how we do things around here,” the decision no one really owns, the interruption everyone tolerates.
Before you can remove either one, you have to learn to see them.
So it’s not that we’re running out of time. We’re losing the value of our time. Lack of clarity and friction quietly increase the effort required to get work done and achieve goals, and that extra effort creates the leaks that steal the value of our hours. If we remove the friction, we don’t gain another hour (although it may feel that way). We simply restore the value of the twenty-four hours we already have.
And sure, not all resistance is avoidable. Gravity and time are unavoidable, right? A customer changing requirements may be unavoidable. But unclear priorities? Unnecessary meetings? Poorly defined ownership? Lack of role clarity, missing information, enabled bad behaviors, poor KPIs, no SLAs, unclear hand-offs, inconsistent operating rhythms? Those aren’t inevitable. They’re avoidable. And every one of them sneakily gets built into the way work gets done, increasing the time, energy, attention, and coordination required to accomplish something, quietly reducing the value of every minute you spend. That’s friction.
Well, you don’t.
But you can restore the value of the twenty-four you already have by doing two things.
First, get clear on what you’re trying to accomplish, articulate what the ideal path looks like, and hypothesize how much time is required to get it done.
Then look for the friction that’s quietly increasing that cost.
And the next time you catch yourself or someone on your team saying, “I wish I had more time,” or “We don’t have time to do this,” pause then ask two questions.
If the answer isn’t clear - stop there. Take the time to step back, zoom out, identify your goals, and get super clear on what you’re doing and why. Make sure you work on things that align with your destination and are meaningfully moving you toward the outcome you’re trying to achieve. Because optimizing the thing you’re doing won’t matter if you’re headed in the wrong direction!
This is where friction lives. Once you’re clear on where you’re going and you begin to remove the avoidable resistance along the way, something pretty darn cool happens. You don’t get more time. You achieve more with the time you already have.
So, first make sure you’re solving the right problem. Then remove the friction preventing you from solving it well. Every meaningful improvement starts by understanding reality before trying to improve it.
Understand before you enable. See before you systematize.
You don’t optimize execution unless you’re executing the right thing. You don’t get more time. You restore the value of the time you already have. That’s the closest any of us will ever get to 25 hours a day.