Nick Millican on How to Identify and Address Your Most Pressing Tasks During Busy Days

There are days when everything feels urgent—emails ping, calls stack, decisions pile up. But ask Nick Millican, CEO of Greycoat Real Estate, how he manages those days, and you won’t hear about productivity hacks or color-coded apps. You’ll hear about hierarchy.

For Millican, the key to navigating a packed schedule isn’t doing more—it’s understanding what truly matters. And that starts with a simple, often-overlooked discipline: thinking clearly before acting quickly.

As the leader of a firm managing high-stakes commercial real estate in central London, Millican faces constant demands on his time. Yet his focus, he says, isn’t on handling everything. It’s on addressing the right things at the right moment, as discussed in this interview.

His approach begins with a single question: What’s the decision or action today that, if done well, will unlock progress elsewhere? Not everything on a to-do list has equal weight. Some tasks are foundational—what Nick Millican calls “leverage moves”—that create downstream clarity. Others are noise dressed up as urgency. In a recent piece on tenant demand driving sustainable real estate forward, he explains how these market pressures are changing development priorities.

The trick is being honest about which is which. Millican’s method is less about efficiency than about effectiveness. It’s about identifying what only you can do, what will meaningfully move the needle, and what can wait—or be delegated. On busy days, this often means zooming out before zooming in. Taking five minutes to assess the field before diving into your inbox. Reorienting around impact, not immediacy. That mindset is echoed in a London Loves Business feature highlighting how Millican and Greycoat weigh long-term environmental ROI while navigating London’s real estate evolution.

At Greycoat, this approach plays out in how strategic decisions are made. In high-pressure environments—whether assessing a new development, navigating regulatory shifts, or managing capital partnerships—Millican resists the temptation to equate activity with progress. His focus is on forward motion with purpose. A BBN Times profile also explores how Nick Millican evaluates London’s changing approach to demolition, illustrating his broader strategy of measured responsiveness.

But this isn’t a cold, mechanical sorting of tasks. It’s deeply human. Millican builds in time to think, space to recalibrate, and checks in with his team not just on output, but on alignment. Because often, the most pressing task isn’t the most visible one—it’s the unresolved tension, the stuck project, the miscommunication slowing everything down.

And that’s the difference: where many executives react to pressure with speed, Nick Millican meets it with precision. Not by ignoring the noise, but by training himself to hear what’s beneath it.

The result? A leadership model that’s as thoughtful as it is productive. A calendar that reflects priority, not panic. And a team that moves with clarity, even when the day is full.

Because when the pace picks up—and it always does—it’s not the number of things you check off that defines your success. It’s your ability to discern which few things are worth your best attention.