SMORs: Small Moments of Reflection that Change how you Lead

If I asked you to pull up your calendar from the last 30 days, what would I see?

Back-to-back meetings.
No margin.
No reflection.
No pause.

Now a harder question:
If someone inferred your values from your calendar alone, what would they conclude?

Because your calendar is more than a scheduling tool. It is a moral document.

It reveals what you protect.
What you prioritize.
What you permit.

And for many leaders, it tells a story of constant motion – but very little space.

Here’s the deeper tension: Are you running your calendar – or is it running you?

Research suggests that the human mind wanders nearly 47% of the time – and that wandering is associated with lower happiness. Layer onto that the reality of modern work: constant context switching, fragmented attention, and minimal recovery time.

Studies show it can take more than 20 minutes to fully regain focus after an interruption. Yet most leaders switch contexts every few minutes.

By mid-afternoon, it’s not that you lack discipline or commitment. It’s that your nervous system is saturated. And there is a leadership cost to that saturation.

When you are cognitively fragmented, you become emotionally thinner.

You react more quickly.
You listen less deeply.
You rush to fix instead of taking time to understand.

In short – you lose the very qualities leadership requires most in complex environments.

So how do we begin to shift this? Not with a complete overhaul. Not with unrealistic time blocks that never hold.

But with something smaller – and surprisingly powerful: SMORs.

Small Moments of Reflection.

These are micro-boundaries built into the flow of your day. Not hours of offsite reflection, but intentional pauses between moments.

Cathy Engelbert, former CEO of Deloitte, is known for scheduling brief SMORs, buffers between meetings, to create space not just to transition logistically, but to reset mentally.

A SMOR can be as short as five or ten minutes.
But its impact is disproportionate.

In that space, you ask:

• What just happened?
• What am I carrying that isn’t mine?
• What tone do I want to set next?

These questions do something subtle but powerful: they return you to yourself.

They create a moment of awareness in a day that would otherwise blur. They allow you to release accumulated tension instead of carrying it forward. They help you show up to the next interaction with intention – not residue. And over time, these small moments compound.

You become more present.

More deliberate.
More aligned with the kind of leader you actually want to be.

This is not about perfection. There will still be full days. Tight timelines. Competing demands. But even in the busiest schedules, there is usually more agency than we assume.

A 10-minute buffer.
A delayed meeting start.
A protected pause before a critical conversation.

These are small choices – but they shape how you lead. So take a look at your calendar again. Does it reflect the leader you aspire to be? Does it create the conditions for clarity, presence, and connection?

If the answer is yes, protect it.
If the answer is no, that’s not failure.

That’s the work.

Because leadership is not just lived in big decisions. It is lived in the spaces between them.

And sometimes, the smallest moments are the ones that change everything.