The best meeting of your day is the dog walk
Somewhere in your week is a meeting with no agenda, no screen, no minutes and mandatory attendance, enforced by a creature entirely unmoved by your deadlines. If you share your life with a dog, you already hold this meeting daily. Mine is chaired by Enzo, the cavoodle who got a whole children’s book out of me, and the case here is that it may be the most productive meeting you attend, and that the productivity is not an accident.
Why thinking happens at walking pace
Everyone knows the shower phenomenon: the solution that would not come at the desk arrives, uninvited, mid-shampoo. The mechanism is unglamorous. Problems untangle when the conscious mind stops gripping them, and the mind only lets go when the body is occupied with something routine and the inputs stop. Walking is routine. A footpath offers weather, other dogs and the occasional ibis, and none of it arrives as a notification.
A walk with a dog adds something a solo walk lacks: an external pace-setter. Left alone, a busy person walks like they email, fast and with a destination. A dog walks like a reader in a bookshop, stopping wherever the information is. The stops are the point. Every pause at a fence post is an interruption to your momentum and, reliably, the moment a stuck thought moves. It is difficult to ruminate at high intensity while a small animal investigates a shrub. The dog is not aware of providing this service and would charge for it if it were.
The dog is the discipline
There is no shortage of advice about building thinking time into a working week, and most of it fails for one reason: a calendar block is negotiable and gets negotiated away. The first casualty of a busy day is always the appointment with yourself.
The dog does not accept the meeting being moved. Rain, deadlines, a board pack due at nine: the walk happens, because the alternative is a set of consequences the dog has thought through more rigorously than most risk registers. This is why the habit holds where the productivity app did not. Consistency imposed by someone else outperforms discipline supplied by yourself, and it is slightly humbling that the someone else in this arrangement operates entirely on biscuits.
The practice compounds, too. One walk clears a head. A year of daily walks builds the habit of letting problems breathe before forcing them, and that habit follows you back to the desk. In my advisory work, judgement is the asset, and judgement is mostly the discipline of not answering immediately. The walk trains it daily.
Leave the phone in your pocket, or at home
The obvious objection is that most dog walks are now conducted one-handed, with a podcast running or an inbox open. That is a fair objection, and it converts the best meeting of the day back into every other meeting of the day. The walk works because the inputs stop. A phone that stays in a pocket, on ring, keeps you reachable for genuine emergencies while removing the scroll. Twenty minutes without input is maintenance for the head that makes all your decisions, and it is the cheapest maintenance it will ever get.
Start with one walk a day taken properly: no audio, no email, dog sets the pace. The first week feels slow. Somewhere in the second, you will notice which problems solve themselves at walking speed, and the meeting will start protecting its own place in your week.
Frequently asked questions
Why do walks help with thinking and problem-solving?
Routine physical movement with low information input lets attention loosen, which is when stuck problems tend to resolve. A dog walk adds an external pace and regular pauses, which interrupt momentum and rumination more effectively than walking alone.
How long does the walk need to be?
Long enough for the mental gear change, which for most people is 20 to 30 minutes. The conditions matter more than the duration: no audio, no screen, and a pace set by the dog rather than the diary.
What if you do not have a dog?
The mechanism still works with a borrowed dog, a walking partner who tolerates silence, or a route with no errands attached. Shelters and rescue organisations, including the RSPCA, also welcome volunteer dog walkers, which solves two problems at once.
About the author
Monique Chelin is the author of ‘Enzo Finds His Friends’ and ‘Switch it On!’, with 100% of author profits supporting RSPCA Australia and Opportunity International Australia, where she has been an Ambassador since 2010. She is also a Brisbane-based sustainability consultant, board director (GAICD), and founder of MJC Sustainability, advising mining, infrastructure and government organisations on ESG risk. Connect with Monique at mjcsustainability.com.
