The 25th Hour by Neal Schore
Neal Schore’s The 25th Hour enters the crowded productivity field with a useful corrective: the calendar is not always the villain. We lose time not only to meetings, emails and inefficient systems, but to worry, resentment, defensiveness, embarrassment and the small dramas we privately rehearse long after the work itself has finished. Schore, an executive coach and former entrepreneur, argues that gaining time begins with learning to manage one’s emotional reactions before they become decisions, conversations or avoidances.
The book’s central claim is persuasive because it is immediately recognisable. A difficult email becomes half a day of mental prosecution. A colleague’s tone becomes evidence of disrespect. A mistake becomes catastrophe before anyone else has noticed it. Schore is sharpest when he shows how these private spirals become shared costs. One person’s insecurity can generate an unnecessary meeting; another’s fear of looking ignorant can turn a simple question into wasted labour for the whole team. In this sense, The 25th Hour is less a book about squeezing more productivity from the day than about refusing to export panic into the workplace.
Schore organises his advice around memorable tools. “What’s the Intent?” asks readers to pause before reacting. “Pose a Clarifying Question” buys time and forces ambiguity into the open. “What’s the Worst Thing That Can Happen?” asks dread to become specific. Elsewhere, he uses intentionally comic shorthand such as “the Ucks”, “Pity Party”, “cookies”, “the robot” and the “Line of Mediocrity”. These labels will divide readers. Some will find them practical and easy to recall under pressure; others may feel they belong too comfortably to the language of executive workshops. Yet their purpose is clear. They are handles for moments when self-awareness is least available.
The prose is brisk, direct and largely unadorned. Schore writes for use, not elegance. His examples tend to follow a familiar pattern: a professional problem appears, an emotional habit is named, a tool is applied, and proportion returns. This makes the book accessible, but also predictable. After a while, the structure begins to feel too smooth, as though every workplace difficulty has been waiting patiently for its assigned framework.
That smoothness also points to the book’s main limitation. Schore is right that fear wastes time, but dread does not explain everything. Bad management, unequal power, burnout, family responsibilities, precarious work and institutional dysfunction cannot always be solved by better self-command. The book occasionally places too much faith in individual agency, and readers outside the professional class it primarily addresses may find some assumptions narrow.
Even so, The 25th Hour offers several ideas worth keeping. Its best sections move beyond productivity into self-possession, asking what kind of person one becomes when fear is no longer allowed to run the meeting. The book is strongest not as a miracle method for finding an extra hour, but as a practical guide to interrupting the stories that steal attention before the day has properly begun. It is repetitive, sometimes overly packaged, but often useful. For leaders, managers and newer professionals learning to navigate pressure without turning every discomfort into theatre, Schore’s book provides a sturdy set of questions to reach for before the next reaction becomes the next problem.
Reviewer: Chris Reed
Gallery Books
