The Unharvested Edge

Grace and creativity thrive in the white space of life

I've been away from this page for a few weeks. The transition back to Johannesburg and into a less transient living situation filled every available line — logistics, storage, packing, unpacking, banking, cell phones –the hundred small decisions that come with creating a second home. And somewhere in the middle of it all I noticed something familiar: the fuller the page got, the less I could think. Not think harder. I was thinking harder than ever. I just couldn't think wider.

The reality of decision fatigue set in - a condition I think many leaders suffer when in challenging seasons and business growth spurts.

What a full page does to a leader

Most well-designed books don’t include text that runs to the edge of the paper. There are margins on all four sides, space between the lines, a gap between each new section. Take that white space away, and the words are still there, every one of them, but the pages become far more challenging to navigate, if not unreadable. None of the message or content gets lost when you remove the space, but you lose the breathing room to interpret it. Leaders do this to their calendars without flinching.

Meeting to meeting, no gap. Decision to decision. Every open block is treated as waste to be recovered. It looks like stewardship. It feels like diligence. But the brain under sustained load behaves in a very particular way: it stays locked onto focused, task-executing mode and doesn't have the chance to ease into the reflective mode where connection, insight, and perspective take shape. Attention narrows. The urgent problem in front of you grows until it fills the frame. You fixate. You solve the same problem four times instead of asking whether it's the right problem to solve in the first place.

A margin-to-margin leader is not a more productive leader. They are a leader with no peripheral vision.

The critical point is that peripheral vision is most of a leader's job. Noticing that a capable person has gone quiet. Sensing that the strategy is technically on track but quietly drifting off course. Hearing what wasn't said in the meeting. None of that arrives through effort. It arrives in the gap - in the white space of your day.

God built margin into the harvest

There's a command in Leviticus that speaks to this:

"When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest." (Leviticus 19:9)

Read it as an economist, and it's inefficient. That grain is yours. You planted it, you tended it, you own it, and you are being told to leave it standing.

But the unharvested edge wasn't waste. It was the mechanism of provision. It was where the widow, the poor, and the foreigner found food, and where the landowner's ownership was regularly interrupted by the reminder that the field was never fully his. The margin was where grace happened. Not the middle of the field. The edge.

The same holds in a leader's schedule. The grace you're waiting on — the clarity, the right word for a difficult conversation, the conviction about a decision you've been circling for a month — tends not to show up in the crowded centre of your diary. It shows up in the space - the margins - where you were tempted to harvest.

I am always saddened by leaders who are too busy to allow themselves the very margin they need in order to achieve greater results. The wiser mindset to adopt is that the busier you are, the more margin you need to intentionally create, to avoid overload and a brain that's stuck in overdrive.

Jesus modelled this without apology. At the height of demand, with the crowds pressing in and the work manifestly unfinished, He said to His disciples, "Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest" (Mark 6:31). He left ministry undone. Deliberately. The One with the shortest window and the highest calling still refused to reap to the edges.

What this looks like on Monday

Margin isn't leisure, and it isn't laziness. It's unallocated capacity, held on purpose.

• Protect the gap between, not just the block for. Fifteen minutes between meetings is not dead time. It's where the last conversation gets processed, and the next one gets approached as a person rather than an item. Remember, YOU control your diary, not the other way around. Whatever you say yes to means you’re saying no to something else.

• Keep one genuinely open block a week. Not a planning block. Open. Most leaders cannot tolerate this at first, which is itself the diagnosis. It’s a creative block. It’s a “think clearly about the bigger issues” block.

• Watch for the fixation signal. When you've returned to the same problem repeatedly without movement, the answer is rarely more focus. Step away and let the wider thinking network do its work. People often wonder why their best ideas come in the shower, or right as they wake up. It’s a symptom of a brain at rest.

• Lead the margin, don't just take it. Your team reads your calendar as permission and as a model/template. A leader who never stops has told everyone that stopping is a performance risk. Model a rhythm that builds momentum and fruitfulness.

Where in your week have you been reaping to the very edges? And what might be waiting for you in the part of the field you've never left standing?