Article

4 Ways to free up time for busy teams

In this article, you’ll discover how to help your team reclaim precious time using a simple yet powerful mantra inspired by William’s F1.

Luke Battye (UK)

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…

·

Dec 4, 2025

In this article, you’ll learn:

How to identify and stop low-impact projects that drain resources.

Why having a simple, explicit focus can help your team concentrate on what truly matters.

How to stress-test a mantra to democratise decision-making and keep strategy clear.

How to normalise relentless focus so every decision pivots around “does it drive impact?”

Article

4 Ways to free up time for busy teams

In this article, you’ll discover how to help your team reclaim precious time using a simple yet powerful mantra inspired by William’s F1.

Luke Battye (UK)

·

…

·

Dec 4, 2025

In this article, you’ll learn:

How to identify and stop low-impact projects that drain resources.

Why having a simple, explicit focus can help your team concentrate on what truly matters.

How to stress-test a mantra to democratise decision-making and keep strategy clear.

How to normalise relentless focus so every decision pivots around “does it drive impact?”

Article

4 Ways to free up time for busy teams

In this article, you’ll discover how to help your team reclaim precious time using a simple yet powerful mantra inspired by William’s F1.

Luke Battye (UK)

·

…

·

Dec 4, 2025

In this article, you’ll learn:

How to identify and stop low-impact projects that drain resources.

Why having a simple, explicit focus can help your team concentrate on what truly matters.

How to stress-test a mantra to democratise decision-making and keep strategy clear.

How to normalise relentless focus so every decision pivots around “does it drive impact?”

How to lose the 30-page strategy deck and focus on doing less, better.

How to lose the 30-page strategy deck and focus on doing less, better.

How to lose the 30-page strategy deck and focus on doing less, better.

“Our biggest challenge is finding the time to focus on this.”

We hear some version of this from teams nearly every day (and are guessing you do, too!) The reality is that most leadership and project teams are drowning in competing priorities, endless meetings, and initiatives that sounded good on paper but don’t move the needle.

What is the danger of staying in this cycle? Burnout, wasted budgets, and missed opportunities. The teams that thrive are the ones that deliberately create space for high-leverage work — the projects that accelerate growth, sharpen customer experience, and strengthen long-term strategy.

So, how do you free up time to focus on the big stuff? 

Inspiration from Williams F1: A Mantra for Focus

We’re inspired by the William’s F1 team's mantra of “Does it make the car go faster?” They use this simple question to iternalise strategy and democratise decision making. Every engineer, mechanic, and strategist knows how to settle a debate or make a choice by coming back to that one question.

It’s not just a slogan — it’s a decision filter. A tool to ensure energy is directed where it has the most impact. In your organisation, the equivalent might be:

  • Does this improve the customer experience?

  • Does this create measurable revenue growth?

  • Does this strengthen our market position in the next 12 months?

When your team has a mantra like this, the clutter falls away.

Identify what you'll stop doing

The first step in freeing up time for teams is to identify what you'll stop doing.

Review your current projects and initiatives to determine which ones are taking up too much time and not delivering sufficient impact. Here are a few techniques to try:

Project Audit

List every ongoing project and rank them against your strategic priorities.

Project Funeral

Host a session where teams “kill off” low-impact projects.

Time Tracking

Analyse where meetings, reporting, or processes consume more energy than they deliver in results.

By identifying what you'll stop doing, you'll be able to free up resources that can be allocated to those high-leverage projects.

Get explicit (and simple) about your focus

Once you’ve cleared the clutter, the next step is to define the leap you want to make.

Ask your team these three questions:

"What would create the biggest win in the next 90 days?"

"What problem, if solved, would move us closer to our vision?"

"What’s the single most important metric we want to improve right now?"

When your focus is simple, it becomes memorable. Long, vague strategy decks rarely influence behaviour. A short, sharp focus statement can.

Stress test a mantra

Once you've identified the focus, stress test a mantra with your team.

Your mantra is where strategy meets culture. Use a simple question, like the William's F1 team's "Does it make the car go faster?" to help internalise strategy and democratise decision-making. It should be short and actionable. Start with a draft (e.g. “Does it grow customer lifetime value?”) and then stress-test it:

  • Ask your team to poke holes in it.

  • Apply it to recent decisions — does it work as a filter?

  • Adjust wording until it’s both memorable and meaningful.

The goal isn’t to craft the perfect phrase but to land on a guiding question everyone can use. Once it's refined, commit to and resource projects accordingly.

Normalise a relentless focus

Even the best mantra won’t work if it’s only said once in a strategy workshop. Leaders need to normalise it — weaving it into daily standups, board updates, and performance reviews. Be intentional and help the team understand the strategic focus without becoming overwhelmed.

Practical ways to do this:

  • Open meetings by revisiting the mantra.

  • Ask it explicitly during decision-making moments.

  • Celebrate wins where the mantra led to the right call.

Repetition matters. The more your team hears and applies the mantra, the more it becomes second nature.

Build ownership

Get teams owning high-level strategy in just 4 weeks.

Talk to us

Meet the team

Build ownership

Get teams owning high-level strategy in just 4 weeks.

Talk to us

Meet the team

Build ownership

Get teams owning high-level strategy in just 4 weeks.

Talk to us

Meet the team

Create the conditions for strategic focus

One of the barriers to success for relentless focus is when the environment doesn’t support focus. Leaders have a critical role to play in clearing the path.

That might mean:

Protecting time

Blocking out no-meeting windows or focus days so teams can work on high-leverage projects without constant interruptions.

Setting expectations

Making it clear that not every request deserves a “yes” and giving teams permission to decline work that doesn’t align with the mantra.

Modelling behaviour

Leaders who visibly pause to ask the mantra question before making decisions normailse relentless focus.

Removing friction

Streamlining approvals, reducing redundant reporting, and simplifying tools all help free up energy for what matters most.

When leaders actively design the conditions for focus, teams gain the confidence and capacity to pursue bold goals without being dragged back into the noise of business as usual.

How we apply this at Sprint Valley

At Sprint Valley, we follow these same steps. We run our business like a product. Each quarter we narrow down our focus into 1 or 2 key questions we want to answer that quarter.

We have a backlog split out into: Sales, Marketing, Operations, Product, Customer Success and Finance. Each quarter, we upvote the features we want to ship according to what will help us reach that quarter’s focus.

This approach keeps us honest. It forces us to continually ask: “Does this project drive the impact we need right now?”

The payoff of doing less, better

Freeing up time isn’t about getting more efficient at doing everything. It’s about choosing what not to do so you can do the most important things brilliantly.

When your team gets disciplined about this:

  • Meetings shrink and become more purposeful.

  • Projects feel energising instead of exhausting.

  • Strategy becomes lived behaviour, not a slide deck.

So tell us: what would you focus on if your team had 10% more time to put into the work that truly matters?