You may spend an entire day moving from meeting to meeting, answering messages, solving problems, and responding to other people’s priorities, only to reach the evening with the unsettling feeling that the hours somehow disappeared. If you’ve ever wondered why you never have enough time despite working constantly, executive coach Neal Schore offers a different way to understand the problem. Much of the time we experience as “lost” is actually being surrendered through emotional reactions, assumptions, rumination, unnecessary conflict, and the energy we spend trying to control circumstances and people outside our influence.
That idea sits at the heart of Neal’s book, The 25th Hour, and his broader philosophy of leadership. His argument begins with a deceptively simple principle: you manage you. The more effectively you can manage your attention, emotional responses, decisions, and behavior, the more deliberately you can use the hours already available to you.
During this conversation, Neal shares the personal experience that changed his relationship with time, explains why emotional self-regulation has become central to his coaching practice, and offers practical tools for interrupting the patterns that quietly consume our attention. His approach moves the conversation beyond conventional productivity advice and toward a more fundamental question: what happens when we become responsible for the way we experience and respond to our lives?
How Emotional Self-Regulation Helps You Reclaim Your Time
Most approaches to time management begin with the calendar. We reorganize meetings, create task lists, block focus time, and search for more efficient ways to process information. These strategies can help, but Neal believes they address only part of the problem.
The deeper source of lost time often lives between an event and our response to it.
A difficult email can take thirty seconds to read. A disappointing comment can take a few seconds to hear. A meeting can run thirty minutes longer than expected. The measurable event is relatively small. What follows can become much larger. We replay the conversation, question what someone meant, imagine what they might do next, revisit what we should have said, and carry the emotional residue into the next meeting.
Neal calls this “swirl.” It is the accumulation of mental and emotional activity that keeps an experience alive long after the original event has ended.
Emotional self-regulation gives us a way to interrupt that process. When we learn to recognize the moment our attention is being captured, we can create enough space to decide what deserves our energy and what can be released.
Your Calendar Isn’t the Only Place You’re Losing Time
A calendar can tell you where your hours are scheduled. It cannot tell you how much attention you are spending inside those hours.
Neal’s own Lake Michigan story illustrates the distinction. While vacationing with his young children, he received a request from a board member for a brief call about an acquisition opportunity he already knew was unlikely to materialize. Intellectually, he understood the call had little value. Emotionally, he felt compelled to accept it because he feared disappointing the board member or being left out.
The fifteen-minute call became an hour and forty-five minutes. By the time Neal finished, his children had already lost interest in the afternoon activity he had planned with them. The important lesson came afterward. The board member had done nothing wrong. Neal recognized that the decision belonged to him. He had allowed his own fear system to determine where his attention went.
As he explains in the interview, “I did not manage myself.”
That realization became a defining moment because it changed the question. Instead of asking how to fit more into the day, Neal began asking how he could become better at managing himself.
The Hidden Cost of Mental Swirl
When an unexpected problem occurs, the event itself might take only two minutes. But the resulting mental “swirl”—the internal debate, the frustration, the self-doubt, and the endless replaying of what happened—can consume hours of high-value focus.
Emotional self-regulation allows you to catch this internal swirl early. By practicing attention management, you stop letting brief disruptions derail entire afternoons by giving your time away.
In this episode, you’ll learn
- Why you may feel chronically short on time even when you are highly productive
- How emotional reactivity can consume more attention than the event that triggered it
- Why Neal Schore believes self-management is more important than conventional time management
- How a family vacation in Northern Michigan became a defining moment in Neal’s leadership philosophy
- What Neal means by the “25th hour” and how to reclaim time you have been giving away
- Why asking “What’s the intent?” can interrupt assumptions and emotional spirals
- How the distinction between ordinary and exceptional behavior can change the way you approach your work
- Why acknowledging your own progress is an important part of becoming a more intentional person
- How to use Neal’s pause, clarify, and question practice in everyday interactions
Why Your Emotional Reactions Consume More Time Than You Realize
Our reactions often become more expensive than the events that triggered them.
Neal describes the “Ughs” as the negative emotional responses that begin to weigh on us and spread through our interactions. A frustrating meeting can affect the next meeting. A tense conversation can follow us home. An unresolved disagreement can become a recurring topic with colleagues who were never involved in the original situation.
In one example from Neal’s coaching practice, a young professional became consumed by an argument she could barely remember. She had replayed it before going to sleep, thought about it the next morning, discussed it with colleagues, and continued carrying the resentment through her workday. When Neal helped her calculate the accumulated time, the single disagreement had contributed to roughly 41 hours of measurable “spinning” across her and several other people.
The event itself had become almost irrelevant. The reaction had become the real cost.
That is why emotional self-regulation belongs in any serious conversation about productivity. Attention is a finite resource, and every unresolved emotional loop competes for it.
When a Five-Minute Event Becomes a Three-Hour Conversation in Your Head
Neal Schore shares a defining story from early in his career that illustrates this dynamic perfectly. After running a team meeting, a colleague ten years his senior pulled him aside and said, “Neal, you’re really powerful,” and walked away.
Neal was mortified. He spent the next three months softening his tone, second-guessing his decisions, and trying not to appear “powerful” because his brain interpreted the comment as a threat. When he finally confronted her, her answer was simple: “You sit tall, you explain complex ideas clearly, and you have patience. It’s empowering.”
It was a compliment! Neal had spent a quarter of a year fighting an invented threat—a classic failure of self-management driven by our ancient survival circuitry.
Why We Give Other People’s Behavior So Much Power
When your standing in a group feels uncertain, your nervous system flags ambiguous data as danger until proven otherwise. You assume the worst, construct elaborate internal narratives, and exhaust your bandwidth. By mastering emotional self-regulation, you stop allowing other people’s tone, brief texts, or neutral looks to hijack your internal peace.
The 25th Hour: A Different Way to Think About Time
Neal’s relationship with this idea began long before The 25th Hour became a book.
While building Triton, he describes living at a relentless pace, moving from meetings to airports to business responsibilities and family commitments without much white space in between. He had convinced himself that constant motion was simply the price of leadership.
Over time, he began recognizing what that pace was costing him. There was less quality time with his spouse, less presence with his children, and less space for himself.
That experience eventually informed the philosophy behind his coaching practice and his book. The 25th Hour is built around the idea that reclaiming time requires more than optimizing a calendar. It requires understanding the emotional habits that cause us to give our attention away.
Neal’s challenge is especially relevant for high performers because productivity can become another form of avoidance. A person can become extraordinarily efficient while remaining trapped in patterns of fear, overcommitment, people-pleasing, defensiveness, or indecision.
The deeper achievement is learning to manage yourself well enough that your productivity serves your life rather than consuming it.
Why Exceptional Leadership Begins With Self-Management
Neal makes an important distinction between ordinary and exceptional behavior. In his framework, ordinary simply means typical. It describes the patterns most people have learned and repeat because those patterns are familiar.
Exceptional behavior emerges when someone becomes willing to interrupt the sequence.
That might mean questioning whether a meeting is necessary, clarifying someone’s intent instead of assuming it, accepting feedback without turning it into a personal threat, or modeling a healthier way of working for the people around you.
For Neal, leadership development therefore begins internally. When leaders manage themselves effectively, their behavior becomes a model for everyone around them. He has seen this approach influence productivity because people tend to follow what leaders consistently demonstrate.
You Can Control Your Response
Exceptional leadership starts with recognizing that while you cannot control circumstances, you have absolute ownership over your response. Effective self-management shifts your focus away from trying to control others and back toward regulating your own mind. When you master your internal state, you build true stress management and lower the daily toll of emotional reactivity.
The Question That Can Interrupt an Emotional Reaction
When you notice yourself getting triggered, defensive, or ready to spiral into frustration, you need a cognitive circuit breaker. To practice effective emotional intelligence, introduce Neal Schore’s go-to question:
“What’s the intent?”
Pause Before You Personalize
When someone makes a sharp remark or asks an unexpected question in a meeting, our default reaction is often defensiveness: “Why are they calling me out?” Pausing to ask “What’s the intent?” forces your brain out of fast, reactive System 1 thinking and into slow, analytical System 2 processing.
Replace Assumptions With Curiosity
Most of the time, the other person’s intent isn’t to insult or undermine you. They might simply be seeking visibility, asking for quick feedback, or dealing with their own stress. Pausing to clarify intent eliminates hours of manufacturing non-existent threats and preserves your vital attention management.
How to Stop Giving Your Time Away
The most useful way to apply Neal’s philosophy is to start observing where your attention goes after something happens.
Consider an ordinary workday. You receive an unexpected message and spend twenty minutes thinking about its tone. A meeting runs over because you hesitate to redirect the conversation. A colleague makes a comment you interpret personally, and you revisit it throughout the afternoon. Later, you find yourself explaining the situation to someone else, extending the emotional life of an event that might otherwise have ended in seconds.
Each moment appears small. Together, they can consume an hour or more.
Neal’s concept of the 25th hour comes from recognizing that these small losses accumulate. Reclaiming time therefore begins with becoming more deliberate about what receives your attention.
Notice What Consumes Your Attention
Start by observing the moments when your mind leaves the task in front of you.
What conversation are you replaying? Which person’s behavior are you trying to interpret? What decision are you postponing because you are worried about how someone will respond? Which meeting are you attending because you feel obligated rather than because your presence is genuinely necessary?
Awareness turns invisible time loss into something you can examine.
Decide What Deserves Your Energy
Neal frequently challenges leaders to distinguish between what is important and what merely feels urgent.
Sometimes the most productive decision is declining a meeting. Sometimes it is shortening a thirty-minute conversation to fifteen minutes. Sometimes it is spending five quiet minutes looking out the window and allowing your nervous system to settle so you can think clearly again.
The point is to make choices according to what actually contributes to the life and work you are trying to build.
Create Space Between What Happens and What You Do Next
Neal’s advice is remarkably simple: pause, sort out the intent, and ask a question.
He describes this as a practice that can eventually happen in only a few seconds. With repetition, the pause becomes less of an interruption and more of a natural part of how you move through the world.
That small interval can change the trajectory of an interaction. It can keep a difficult comment from becoming a personal story, keep feedback from becoming resentment, and keep a temporary frustration from consuming the rest of your day.
The Trust You Build When You Get Curious
Trust often develops through moments that appear almost insignificant.
A leader asks what someone meant instead of assuming the worst. A colleague acknowledges that their tone landed poorly and takes responsibility for the impact. Someone offers an apology that restores connection before a disagreement becomes a larger conflict.
Neal sees these moments as practical expressions of self-management.
He encourages people to assume positive intent when appropriate and, when uncertainty remains, to clarify it directly. As he puts it, “A massive amount of trust gets built just by asking clarifying questions.”
That idea carries beyond leadership. It applies anywhere people have to interpret one another, which means it applies almost everywhere.
A Different Way to Think About Success
Toward the end of the conversation, Neal shares another practice that reveals a quieter dimension of his philosophy: the graduation speech.
He works with leaders who have accomplished extraordinary things yet remain focused almost exclusively on what still needs to be fixed. His graduation exercise gives them a chance to stop and acknowledge what they have already accomplished.
One leader he coached had progressed through multiple promotions and was thriving in her role. Neal asked her to imagine herself in a cap and gown, standing in front of a mirror and delivering a graduation speech to herself. She even kept a graduation tassel on her desk as a physical reminder of what she had achieved.
The exercise points toward an important dimension of intentional living. We need goals that pull us forward, but we also need practices that allow us to recognize the distance we have already traveled.
Self-respect grows when achievement becomes something we can acknowledge internally rather than something we continually need others to validate.
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About Today’s Guest, Neal Schore
Neal Schore is an executive coach, leadership advisor, entrepreneur, and co-founder and CEO of The 25th Hour Group. A former founder and CEO of Triton Digital, he brings more than two decades of leadership experience to helping high-performing leaders manage themselves, reclaim their time, and lead more effectively.
Neal is the author of The 25th Hour: How to Thrive (And Gain Ridiculous Amounts of Time) by Getting Out of Your Own Way, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster. His work focuses on the emotional patterns that quietly consume our time and energy, and his philosophy centers on a simple idea: before you can manage your time, you have to learn how to manage yourself.
Why Do We Keep Getting in Our OWN Way? Neal Schore Explains
Learn More and Connect
👉 All episode links, my books You Matter, Luma, and The Mattering Effect, The Ignited Life newsletter, and the Start Mattering store are here: linktr.ee/John_R_Miles
FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
What Is Emotional Self-Regulation?
Emotional self-regulation is the ability to recognize an emotional response and intentionally choose how to respond to it. In Neal’s framework, this means creating enough space to understand what is happening, examine your assumptions, and decide what deserves your attention before allowing an automatic reaction to determine your behavior.
How Does Emotional Self-Regulation Help With Time Management?
Emotional self-regulation protects time by reducing the mental energy consumed by rumination, unnecessary conflict, defensive reactions, and attempts to control other people. Neal’s central argument is that reclaiming time begins with learning to manage yourself rather than relying exclusively on calendar and productivity systems.
Why Do Emotional Reactions Waste So Much Time?
The initial event may be brief, while the mental response can continue for hours or days. A comment, disagreement, or frustrating interaction can become a recurring source of thought and conversation when we continue replaying it or assigning motives without clarification. Neal refers to this accumulated mental activity as “swirl.”
What Is the Difference Between Managing Time and Managing Yourself?
Time management focuses primarily on organizing the hours available to you. Managing yourself involves deciding how you use your attention, how you respond to circumstances, what you allow to occupy your mental space, and which situations deserve your energy. Neal argues that the second layer often determines how effectively the first one works.
What Does Neal Schore Mean by “What’s the Intent?”
The question encourages you to examine what another person may actually be trying to accomplish before interpreting their behavior personally. Neal uses it as a way to interrupt assumptions, reduce emotional reactivity, and create an opening for clarification.
How Can I Stop Getting Caught in Emotional Spirals?
Neal recommends beginning with a pause. Take a moment to settle yourself, identify what is happening, consider the other person’s intent, and then ask a clarifying question. With practice, this sequence can become fast enough to use in the middle of ordinary conversations.
How Does Asking Clarifying Questions Build Trust?
Clarifying questions replace assumptions with information. When people feel misunderstood, they often react to the story they believe another person has created about them. Asking what someone meant creates an opportunity for both people to understand the situation more accurately and can prevent a small misunderstanding from becoming a larger conflict.
Why Is White Space Important for Leaders?
White space gives the mind an opportunity to slow down, process information, and think strategically. Neal describes leaders who operate with nearly every moment scheduled and explains how even a few minutes of quiet can help relax the nervous system and create room for better thinking.
