The Power of the Pause
Joy Johnson
Earlier this week I was deep in preparation for two major project kickoffs. The kind of work where every detail matters and every minute feels accounted for.
My project partner kept suggesting something that felt…counterproductive.
“Let’s pause.”
Pause after drafting the materials.
Pause before finalizing the presentation.
Pause before sending the documents.
At first it felt inefficient. When you’re on deadline, pausing can feel like wasting time.
But something interesting happened.
Each time we stepped away—even briefly—we came back sharper. We noticed things we had missed. We refined our thinking. We caught small issues before they became big ones.
The work got better.
By the end of the week, I had a different experience. I was wrapping up several tasks and decided to power through the afternoon with no breaks. I told myself I’d just push through and finish everything.
My focus slowly disappeared.
What should have taken an hour took three. My thinking became foggy. Eventually, I crashed halfway through the day and realized something important:
The pause wasn’t slowing the work down. It was strengthening it.
The Counterintuitive Nature of Pausing
In mission-driven work, pausing can feel almost irresponsible.
When you work in nonprofits, there is always another family to serve, another program to launch, another grant deadline approaching. The needs in our communities are real and urgent.
Stopping—even briefly—can feel like you’re letting someone down.
But the truth is that nonstop motion often produces the very thing we’re trying to avoid: ineffective work.
Without pauses, we lose the ability to reflect, adjust, and improve.
Even the Best Performers Pause
Elite athletes understand this instinctively.
Basketball coaches regularly call timeouts not because the game stops, but because strategy improves during the pause. Some of the most pivotal moments in games happen during those short breaks on the sideline.
Musicians use rests in their compositions for the same reason. As jazz legend Miles Davis famously demonstrated, the silence between the notes is just as powerful as the notes themselves.
And in pop culture, we see the same lesson repeated. In the movie The Karate Kid, Mr. Miyagi forces Daniel to step away from constant sparring and focus on seemingly unrelated movements. The pause in the expected rhythm becomes the training itself.
The lesson shows up everywhere:
Great performance is rarely nonstop motion. It’s rhythm.
Action. Pause. Reflection. Adjustment.
What the Research Says
Scholarly research reinforces what many of us feel intuitively.
Studies in organizational psychology show that strategic breaks improve cognitive performance and decision-making. A widely cited 2011 study in the journal Cognition found that brief mental breaks during demanding tasks significantly improved participants’ ability to stay focused and maintain performance.
Similarly, research on burnout by psychologist Christina Maslach—whose work helped define modern understanding of workplace burnout—shows that chronic exhaustion is one of the primary drivers of reduced effectiveness in service professions.
In other words:
When we remove pauses from the work, we also remove our ability to do the work well.
The Missing Step in Nonprofit Work
In many nonprofits, we move directly from action to more action.
Launch the program.
Serve the clients.
Submit the report.
Start the next initiative.
But we often skip the step that transforms activity into improvement:
evaluation.
Pausing creates the space to ask important questions:
What actually worked?
What surprised us?
Where are we seeing patterns?
What should we do differently next time?
Without that moment of reflection, organizations risk repeating the same mistakes—or missing opportunities to amplify what’s working.
The Strategic Pause
The pause doesn’t have to be long.
Sometimes it’s a 10-minute walk before a decision.
Sometimes it’s a day between drafting a proposal and submitting it.
Sometimes it’s a team conversation after a project closes to capture lessons learned.
But those moments of pause create something invaluable:
clarity.
In the rush of mission-driven work, clarity is often the difference between activity and impact.
A New Way to Think About Urgency
If you work in community development or nonprofit leadership, the pressure to move fast will never disappear. The needs in our communities are too real.
But perhaps the real discipline isn’t working harder or longer.
Perhaps the real discipline is learning when to pause.
Because sometimes the most productive thing you can do for the mission…
is stop for a moment and think.
With more than two decades of experience in community development, real estate strategy, and organizational leadership, Joy Johnson brings a seasoned, solutions-focused voice to the field. She is committed to helping communities and institutions avoid systemic pitfalls and build models that truly work. To reach Joy call (216) 238-2235.