Agency Over Urgency
Not time management.
Agency over your own attention.
A 2-hour live workshop for people who are done operating at a pace that was never theirs — and ready to find out what agency over their own attention actually feels like.
“Marie-Louise has created an inviting space where she generously shares her beautiful art, life experiences, and wonderfully grounding meditations. It is the perfect place to practice being fiercely human.”
Nance Scott-The Wellbeing Apothecary
We've all experienced the relativity of time.
Sit in the doctor's waiting room and 15 minutes feel like 3 hours. Meanwhile the 2-hour Arctic Monkeys concert didn't nearly last long enough.
That 5-minute daily meditation? Who's got time for that! Oops, you just spent 45 minutes doomscrolling the latest patriarchal nonsense the dudes of this planet just cooked up.
You know what I'm talking about.
It's slightly funny until you start getting serious — about your creative life, your mental health and wellbeing, your parenting, or even just this urge to actually feel yourself live a little.
The problem isn't your calendar. It isn't your discipline. It isn't that you haven't found the right system yet.
The problem is that urgency has become your default operating state.
And nobody installed it with your permission.
Most of what we call urgency isn't responding to genuine emergency.
It's a conditioned trance — running so quietly in the background that you stopped noticing it was there.
The culture of constant productivity needs you anxious and moving fast.
A mind scanning perpetually for the next thing is a mind that doesn't pause to ask whether any of it is actually yours.
Recognising that isn't a scheduling problem.
It asks for a different kind of response entirely.
You've tried planning systems. They help — until the urgency dismantles them
The pressure feels personal, like a character flaw, even though you know it probably isn't
Slowing down sounds obvious in theory; in practice, something in you resists it the moment life gets busy
How I made time work for me
Even though I'm used to questioning concepts — that's what philosophers do for a living — the concept of time always baffled me.
Before seriously questioning and reshaping my relationship with time, I spent almost two decades in a state of constant pressure, overwhelm, and emergency. At age 35 I had four children including a newborn, a business, and had just relocated from China to the UK.
I was always busy. Always on the move.
I didn't know how to rest because everything was a priority.
What I eventually discovered — through philosophy, through contemplative practice, through a lot of trial and error — wasn't a system. It was a reframe.
Urgency isn't a personality trait. It's something that was installed, gradually and without announcement, by every structure around you that benefits from your perpetual rushing.
When I interrupted it — genuinely, from the inside — something became available that hadn't been before.
Not a slower life, exactly. A life more mine.
“When I met Marie-Louise, I was in a moment of great confusion. I was scattering myself across strategies that exhausted me. She enabled me to build a guiding thread, to take action, all while respecting my pace and my values. I regained confidence and rediscovered my motivation, when I wasn't far from giving up.” — Aurélie.
— Former Customer
What becomes possible
When you interrupt the urgency trance rather than managing around it:
Decisions come from discernment rather than pressure — you can tell the difference between what genuinely needs your attention now and what's just been made to feel urgent
Your creative work, your attention, and your nervous system have actual room to move
You unclench your jaw. Your projects get space to unfold
We don't need to do less.
We need to understand that we can choose our own pace,
and that it's allowed to fluctuate.
Agency isn't slowness.
It's authorship.
Introducing:
Agency Over Urgency
A 2-hour live workshop · 24 April 2026 · 2pm BST · Click to see more time zones
This is a facilitated 2-hour workshop for people who already sense that something is off about the urgency they're living inside, and want a framework for working with it, not managing around it.
I ran this work in person in January. What came out of that room confirmed something I'd suspected: the framework holds, and the conversations it opens are ones people have been waiting to have.
Not a time management workshop.
Not about doing more in less time.
About understanding where the urgency comes from:
philosophically
culturally
and in your own nervous system.
You choose what you actually want to act on,
and at what pace.
We move through contemplative practice, direct teaching, and structured reflection.
There is space to think.
There is space to not have it all figured out.
“Marie-Louise knows how to accurately sense others’ needs and support them concretely. Her approach is simultaneously reassuring, caring and structured. Thank you for your philosopher and artist’s vision. A unique and effective combination.”
