From a February 2026 conversation between AlignIQ co-founders Dan Garmat and Caroline Stauss about new Harvard Business Review research on AI and workload.
The HBR research recommends intentional pauses to prevent overload building up. We work it through with a winter sports metaphor.
Key takeaways
- Intentional pauses slow work down strategically. They prevent the quiet accumulation of overload that builds when acceleration goes unchecked.
- Think of skeleton racing: fast, intense runs. Jump straight onto the next track without a break and eventually you crash.
- A pause is also when learning happens: why did I turn slower on that part of the track?
Try this with your team
After your next AI-assisted project, take ten minutes as a team before starting the next one: what went fast, what went wrong, and what would you change?
Going further
AI Leadership Calibration helps leaders build this kind of tempo into how teams work.
Sources mentioned
More from this series
Transcript
Lightly edited from YouTube’s automatic captions for readability. Wording and order are the speakers’ own.
These intentional pauses are ways to slow down work strategically, tactically I guess. They say they “prevent the quiet accumulation of overload that emerges when acceleration goes unchecked.” So you’re accelerating your work.
I guess it would be like sledding versus bobsledding.
“Skeleton.”
Skeleton, right. If you’re doing the skeleton, you’re doing the super fast work, and then you need a break. But if you just jump onto the next skeleton track and never take a break, eventually you’re going to crash.
“Exactly. We don’t want that to happen.”
So the intentional pause is basically saying: all right, you just finished this skeleton track. Now get off and take a break before your next run. Figure out why you turned slower at that part of the track.