The 20-Mile March — And Why I'm Still Learning It
I have a confession.
I am a recovering procrastinator.
And I say recovering loosely — because some weeks I'm more recovered than others.
For most of my life I operated on a cycle that felt productive but was actually just exhausting. I would let things build. Tell myself I worked better under pressure — and honestly, part of me believed it. Then the deadline would arrive and I would go into full firefighter mode. All hands, all hours, everything at once. I'd pull it off. I usually pulled it off.
And then I would collapse.
Completely depleted, zero reserves, nothing left for the people around me or the work that came next. Until the cycle started again.
I told myself it was my style. My process. Just how I'm wired.
What it actually was, was an enormous amount of energy spent managing chaos I was creating myself.
Then I found Jim Collins.
In Great by Choice, Collins tells the story of two expeditions racing to the South Pole in 1911. Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott. Same destination, same brutal conditions, completely different approaches.
Amundsen marched twenty miles every day. Good weather, bad weather, didn't matter. Twenty miles. Consistent, deliberate, non-negotiable.
Scott pushed hard when conditions were good and rested when they weren't. Sprinting and stopping. Effort dictated by circumstance.
Amundsen reached the South Pole and made it home safely.
Scott arrived thirty-four days later. He never made it back.
Collins calls it the 20-Mile March. The discipline of consistent, steady progress over dramatic bursts of effort. Clear markers. Held to regardless of conditions — good or bad.
I read that and felt personally called out.
Because here's what the procrastinate-cram-collapse cycle actually costs — and I don't think we talk about this enough:
It's not just hard on you. It's hard on everyone around you.
The people who work with you feel the chaos even when you think you're managing it invisibly. The energy it takes to sprint, recover, and sprint again bleeds into every room you walk into. And the story you tell yourself — this is just how I work — protects the pattern from ever being examined.
I know. I told myself that story for years.
What I'm learning — still learning, genuinely still in it — is that the steady activity is what creates sustained success. Not the heroic push. Not the all-nighter that saves the deadline. The quiet, undramatic consistency of doing the small thing every day.
Filing every night instead of letting it pile up.
Finishing notes after every meeting instead of trusting I'll remember.
Using the tools available to me — AI, reminders, systems — not as shortcuts but as scaffolding for a steadier pace.
None of it is glamorous. None of it makes a good story at dinner.
But the 20-mile march was never meant to make a good story. It was meant to get you to the destination — and home again.
I'm not going to tell you I've cracked this. I haven't. I still feel the pull toward the familiar chaos sometimes. The deadline adrenaline is real and I won't pretend it isn't.
But I'm more aware of the cost now. To me. To the people around me. To the work itself.
And awareness, in my experience, is always where the change begins.
If you're a fellow firefighter — if you secretly believe you do your best work at the last minute — I'm not here to judge you. I'm right there with you.
I'm just starting to wonder if what we call our best work might actually be what's left after the chaos tax.
And what might be possible if we stopped paying it.
Nancy Girres is an executive coach and Vistage Chair based in Fort Collins, Colorado. She works with leaders who are ready to trade the sprint-and-collapse cycle for something that actually sustains them.