Check your calendar right now. It’s probably blocked out in rigid 30- or 60-minute chunks. A meeting at 2:00pm? The 15 minutes before it feel like ‘dead time’ – too short to start anything, too long to waste. For years, this was how Linda Buckley, Pro Dean of Teaching and Learning and Student Experience at Henley Business School Africa, lived her life.
But then she added a Master’s, and is now pursuing a PhD, further expanding what she describes as an already ‘insane’ workload. Suddenly, the maths no longer worked. There were no spare hours left, and no significant stretches of time to invest in her studies.
To survive, Linda learned a radical lesson from a fellow classmate: the day isn’t made of hours. It’s made of cracks. And what you do with the 10 or 15 minutes between commitments can determine whether you sink or swim.
‘Waiting for a clear hour means you never get anything done. But you can walk dogs in 20 minutes. You can read something in 10 minutes. Small chunks add up faster than waiting for perfect conditions.’
As more professionals head into 2026 carrying full workloads, family responsibilities and a growing need to upskill, Linda’s hard-earned lessons offer a realistic blueprint for studying in a busy world. ‘No one has the time or the luxury to study full-time anymore,’ she says. ‘But study we must, if we want to keep learning and growing.’ Here are six more principles that helped her juggle leadership, life and advanced study without waiting for ‘free time’ that never comes.
Productivity culture often warns against task-switching. But Linda believes modern professionals don’t have the luxury of deep, uninterrupted focus. ‘In this day and age, where we’ve got to switch all the time, you may actually have to become better at switching,’ she says. The fear of switching often leads to paralysis: I can’t start this now. I’ve got a meeting in 20 minutes. The result? Important work grows more intimidating by the day.
Linda discovered that even long study sessions are made up of short bursts. ‘If I set a Sunday aside, I don’t do it for four hours straight,’ she says. ‘It’s lots of little pieces of focus.” In a world of constant demands, adaptability isn’t a weakness. It’s a skill.
Linda is clear-eyed about the cost of studying while working. ‘We cannot expect to breeze through any study not feeling the pain,’ she says. ‘It’s a seven-day week of using your brain.’ Her lowest point came during a statistics module, one that required her to code and run analyses herself.
‘I had a complete meltdown,’ she admits. ‘I’d never done anything like this. Suddenly I’ve got to do Master’s-level stats.’ At the same time, she was hospitalised with a kidney infection. What got her through wasn’t discipline alone; it was purpose. ‘If you understand your purpose, or what you’re trying to do, then you have the energy to keep moving forward even when things are tough,’ she says.
Her research into critical thinking and sustained learning connects directly to her work in ethical leadership and education. That connection kept her going when the work felt dry or overwhelming.
‘Underlying all of this is intentionality,’ Linda says. ‘The way you think, the way you live. It’s about choice.’
The Master’s forced her to reassess how she spent her energy. An ambivert (both introverted and extroverted), and deeply relational person, she struggled at first with turning down social invitations. ‘I won’t easily go to dinner with friends at the moment,’ she says. ‘After what I do at work, it’s exhausting.’
Instead, she schedules what matters most – including time with her family – and lets go of the rest. ‘Saying yes to one thing is saying no to something else,’ she reflects. ‘That’s critical thinking in practice.’
One unexpected lesson wasn’t academic, it was behavioural. For years, Linda was chronically late. ‘I get invested in conversations,’ she says. She believed her attentiveness justified running over time.
Master’s study changed that perspective. ‘I realised managing your time is respectful to self and others,’ she says. ‘If someone has been waiting 10 minutes, that isn’t respect.’ Today, she is almost never late, a shift born from aligning her actions with her values.
Central to Linda’s research is the concept of metacognition: thinking about how you think. ‘As you mature, you understand what you enjoy and how your brain works,’ she says. ‘Then the question becomes: what do you do with that knowledge?’ By understanding her energy patterns, she learned to regulate them. ‘I realised I have to take breaks,’ she says. Rest isn’t optional, it’s strategic.
‘You’ve got to demarcate where you’re going to expend your energy.’
For many professionals, the default belief is simple: I don’t have time. ‘I’ll never find the time is such a limiting thought,’ Linda says. She doesn’t downplay the cost, the exhaustion, the seven-day weeks, the mental strain. But she sees it as the tariff for growth. ‘Imagine me in my role not taking the opportunities afforded to me,’ she says. ‘That would be disrespectful of my own growth.’
Her advice for 2026 is clear: don’t wait for the calendar to clear. It won’t. ‘You won’t find the time,’ she says. ‘You have to make it.’