When the world shut down and offices went dark, I was serving as CTO at Automation Anywhere, a company whose entire mission is to help organizations automate work. Almost overnight, demand for our cloud products surged by roughly 600 percent. Customers who had spent years debating digital transformation suddenly needed it in weeks. Their employees were at home, their processes were breaking, and automation was no longer a strategic initiative; it was a lifeline.

Inside the company, the mood was a mix of adrenaline and anxiety. Our systems were under pressure, our customers were desperate, and our investors had a perfectly rational fear: Would remote work kill productivity? Would we miss critical deadlines? Would we fail the very businesses that were counting on us to survive?

Most leaders, facing that kind of pressure, would have demanded 80-hour weeks and weekend marathons on video calls. The intuitive response in a crisis is to tighten control, increase oversight, and push people harder. I chose the opposite approach.

I told my team to take walks.

Not metaphorical walks. Actual, physical walks. I encouraged them to step away from their screens, read a book, learn something new, play a sport, or simply sit outside and breathe. I asked managers to stop equating “online” with “productive” and to stop measuring commitment by how late someone’s status light stayed green.

It sounded counterintuitive, even reckless, in the middle of a global emergency. But it worked. We didn’t just hold the line; we moved faster than we ever had before.

What I saw in those first chaotic weeks was that motivation was not the problem. People were scared, yes, but they were also deeply committed. Work became an anchor in a world that suddenly felt unmoored. Teams wanted to show up for each other. They wanted to help customers who were scrambling to keep their own businesses alive. The desire to contribute was there; what they lacked was clarity and a structure that allowed them to do their best work without burning out.

So instead of obsessing over hours, I focused on three things: ruthless prioritization, clear communication, and trust.

We stripped our goals down to the essentials. What absolutely had to ship this week? Which customers were in the most critical situations? Which systems needed to be hardened immediately, and which could wait? We made those priorities explicit and repeated them constantly. If a task didn’t support those priorities, it moved down the list or off the list entirely.

Then we paired that clarity with autonomy. No surveillance tools. No demands for hourly check-ins. No pressure to perform “busyness” on camera. I told teams: Here is what matters most. You decide how to get there. If you need to take an hour in the middle of the day to walk, think, or play with your kids, do it. Just be transparent with your teammates and deliver on your commitments.

The result was a culture shift that you could feel in every meeting. People showed up more focused. They were less defensive, more creative, and more willing to raise problems early because they didn’t fear being blamed for not “trying hard enough.” Gratitude replaced exhaustion as the dominant emotion. And grateful employees, in my experience, work harder and smarter than fearful ones ever will.

Only later did I discover how much science supported what, at the time, felt like instinct. Research from San Francisco State University has shown that people who regularly engage in absorbing, non-work activities — creative hobbies, sports, anything that demands full attention — tend to perform significantly better on performance evaluations than those who do not. Stepping away from work, it turns out, is not a distraction from performance; it is a driver of it.

I had already seen this pattern throughout my career, from managing thousands of engineers at Ericsson to leading Sauce Labs as CEO. The more complex the problem, the more important it became to step back from it. Stress narrows your field of vision. Rest and movement widen it again.

For me, squash has always been one of those full-immersion activities. When you are on the court, there is no room in your mind for product roadmaps or investor decks. Your brain gets a break from the constant churn of decisions. When you return to your desk, the problem that felt impossible an hour earlier often looks different, smaller, more solvable.

For the biggest, knottiest problems, I walk. Ten miles is my usual distance. There is something about the rhythm of walking — the steady pace, the changing scenery, the physical forward motion — that helps corral scattered thoughts into something coherent. Ideas that refuse to surface in a conference room will often appear, fully formed, somewhere around mile six.

One of the most important strategic decisions I made at Sauce Labs came on a walk like that: the decision to go all-in on AI-based test authoring and intelligence for large engineering teams. It was not an incremental tweak to our roadmap; it was a fundamental bet on where software development was heading and what our customers would need next. That decision did not emerge from a whiteboard session or a late-night spreadsheet. It emerged from a trail, a long walk, and the mental space to connect dots that had been floating around in my head for months.

None of this means avoiding hard work. In fact, my philosophy combines intense focus with deliberate rest. I call it “eat the frog first.” Every day, identify the task you are most tempted to avoid — the hard conversation, the ambiguous project, the deep technical problem — and do it first. Do it before email, before meetings, before you let the day scatter your attention.

When you eat the frog first, you create momentum. You prove to yourself that you can handle the hardest thing on your plate. That confidence carries into everything else you do. But here is the crucial second step: after you eat the frog, step away. Take a walk. Play a game. Read something unrelated to your field. Let your mind reset before you dive into the next challenge.

This rhythm — intense effort followed by genuine rest — is not laziness. It is an acknowledgment of how humans actually function. We are not servers that can run at 100 percent CPU utilization indefinitely. When we try to behave that way, our decision quality drops, our creativity evaporates, and our teams burn out.

Across all the roles I have held — engineer, founder, CTO, CPO, CEO — the one constant in my routine has been at least 30 minutes a day devoted to something unrelated to technology. Sometimes it is squash. Sometimes it is a long walk. Sometimes it is reading about history, psychology, or art. The content matters less than the distance it creates from my daily responsibilities.

That distance is not a luxury. It is a strategic asset. It keeps your thinking fresh when everything around you is pushing you toward tunnel vision. It allows you to zoom out, to see patterns, to question assumptions that everyone else has quietly accepted as facts.

In the middle of a crisis, it is tempting to believe that the only answer is more: more hours, more meetings, more oversight. My experience has taught me the opposite. The real leverage comes from clarity, trust, and the courage to let people be human.

Trust your people. Eat the frog first. Then, go take a walk.