“I don’t have enough time.” It is the world’s most popular excuse, and quietly its most expensive one. The venture dream, the new book, the fitness plan, the new skill, the quality evening with family — all filed under “later,” a date that has never once appeared on the calendar.
Toshan Tamhane sees time rather differently. He does not treat it as a fixed allowance of 24 hours, but as energy and prioritisation wearing a clock as a disguise.
As the Global Chief Operating Officer (COO) of UPL and a former Senior Partner at McKinsey, he runs complex operations across many countries. Yet outside work he has assembled a life crowded with books, mountains, marathons, startups, teaching and family — an itinerary exhausting merely to read. His story suggests that making time has far less to do with hours than with choices.
A Career That Never Limits Passions
Toshan has spent years climbing to the highest echelons of business, and has stubbornly refused to let that be the whole story.
Before joining UPL, he worked at McKinsey & Company for more than 18 years, becoming one of the firm’s youngest Senior Partners worldwide. He later joined UPL, the world’s fifth-largest agrochemicals company, where he held leadership roles across digital, strategy and operations before becoming its Global COO.
His work has spanned industries, countries and decisions with real consequences. And yet he has never allowed the job to become the man.
Outside the office, he has completed several ultramarathons, including the Marathon des Sables — an endeavour spanning multiple days across the Sahara desert, carrying your own food, which he recommends warmly to anyone who finds ordinary marathons insufficiently uncomfortable. He has climbed Ama Dablam, Aconcagua, Mont Blanc, the Matterhorn, Elbrus, Kilimanjaro and Toubkal. He has invested in more than 65 early-stage startups, mentors founders, teaches at leading management institutions, and is working towards a personal goal of reading 1,000 books. He has finished more than 680.
Every interest, he insists, pays its rent. Running builds discipline. Reading brings fresh, orthogonal ideas. Teaching keeps him learning. Startups keep him humble, solving in six weeks the sort of problem a large corporation would assign to six committees.
Making Time Instead of Finding Time
Plenty of people dream of writing a book and wait patiently for the right time which, much like a delayed flight, is forever about to arrive. Toshan chose a different path. He boarded anyway.
Along with his father and co-author, Dr Ajay Tamhane, he wrote 24 Hours: That’s All It Takes during four long-haul flights, completing the manuscript in a total of 24 hours. What began as a whim — and a friend’s rather tipsy dare — became living proof of the book’s own argument: that meaningful progress comes from making good use of the time we already have.
The book shares practical lessons on time management, daily habits and steady progress towards personal and professional goals. It does not promise to find you extra hours; nobody can. It simply asks you to stop mislaying the ones you own.
Family Is Part of the Balance
A demanding career usually leaves family with the leftovers. Toshan believes the two can be trained together — sometimes quite literally.
He shares his life with his wife, Deepti, and their two teenage children, Asya and Ehaan. All four are unrepentant fitness and sports fanatics: Deepti is training for an Ironman 70.3, Ehaan plays football for a London club, and Asya is a devoted equestrian. Bonding, in the Tamhane household, means training together, travelling to sporting events around the world, and swapping tips on nutrition, recovery and how to beat one another next time.
Writing 24 Hours: That’s All It Takes alongside his father, Dr Ajay Tamhane, made the project more meaningful still, bringing two generations together around a shared belief that time is one of life’s greatest gifts. Father and son spent more real, unhurried hours together than they had in decades — and, remarkably, are still on speaking terms.
Ready for the Next Chapter
Toshan’s appetite for writing shows no sign of slowing.
After co-authoring 24 Hours: That’s All It Takes and Death Becomes Her and Other Short Stories, he is set to release his third book, Along Came a Story, in August 2026. The new collection ventures into romance, love, erotica and suspense, carrying readers through stories full of emotion and unexpected twists — proof, perhaps, that his flights are becoming considerably more interesting.
His willingness to write across wildly different genres reflects another belief he lives by: trying new things keeps life fresh. Repetition is merely boredom with a routine.
A Life Built One Day at a Time
Toshan’s story is about far more than a book, or a corner office. It is about building a life in which work, family, fitness, learning and creativity all get a seat at the table.
Leading a global company, writing books, climbing technical peaks, mentoring founders, teaching students and still making it home for dinner sounds impossible to combine. His life argues otherwise: balance is not one grand decision, but a thousand small ones, made every single day.
To every student, first-jobber and quiet dreamer convinced they are simply too busy: you begin each day with exactly what he begins with. Not talent. Not luck. Not a famous surname. Twenty-four hours. What you build with them is entirely up to you.
Quoting Annie Dillard, Toshan says, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” And so, he adds, we had better spend them purposefully — and with our eyes wide open.
