And so much so that Harvard Business of you has written about how busyness has somewhat become a status symbol in Western business culture because somehow being busy signals importance.
But I don’t know, I just think we’re looking at this all wrong because importance.
It’s just not the same thing as impact.
I know which I’d rather have, but I don’t know.
The problem with us founders, I think, is that we don’t have bosses, so we don’t have anyone grading our output.
So how do we measure productivity?
Is it things like number of tasks completed, the number of hours you’ve worked, how many emails you’ve cleared or how much content has been posted or how many meetings have been books?
Like is it as these sort of things?
Because I know some founders who definitely use these as KPIs or markers for their productivity.
But the problem is none of these things guarantee things that are actually important to the business.
Things like revenue growth, like better margins or stronger positioning or clearer strategy.
These are the things that really matter because you know, you can post every single day and still be invisible.
You could attend millions of networking events and still have no pipeline and you could launch like 3 new offers every week and still have weak demand.
Like honestly, I see this all the time.
People are doing so much work but nothing actually shifts.
It’s more motion and just less traction.
And now I get it right.
There’s clear psychology that explains why being busy feels so good.
Because you know when you tick off those tasks, that gives you dopamine and your brain loves this.
It loves a quick win because that’s what it is.
You know when you achieve inbox zero, that feels productive.
When you decide to reformat your website, that feels productive.
Even if you like a researching tools for three hours for your business, that also feels productive.
But what about things like reviewing your pricing strategy and trying to raise them to be more profitable?
What about making a difficult sales call that could be a bit awkward, or killing a product that isn’t working and making that decision when changing your positioning so that you were clearer to your audience?
What about those things?
Because they’re the things that really make a difference to your business, but those are also the things that leave you feeling maybe risky and uncertain, maybe even a little exposed.
And so your nervous system would rather spend hours tidying your CRM or something than having an uncomfortable conversation about money.
So you convince yourself I’m being productive with this stuff.
But sometimes what you’re really doing is just avoiding the thing that would actually move the business.
So this is where you need to realize that a lot of this being busy stuff is just bullshit.
The really uncomfortable reality that you to face is that you can do things like post daily, send newsletters, build your funnels, attend events, rewrite your pitch deck or optimize your landing pages.
You can do all of those things and still not work because unfortunately no amount of activity is going to, you know, for the sake of activity.
There is like the just doing things for the sake of it.
None of that’s going to fix like a weak value prop or you’re poor targeting and somewhat confused positioning, or if you’ve got no clear sales process and terrible margins, you’re not going to solve that because you need a deep analysis of your business and real strategy to solve those things.
Now I see all the time there are fundamental issues within a business, but instead of taking the time to deal with those issues, founders are busy looking for hacks and tools that make them feel good at the moment.
And you know, there’s business influences that everywhere.
They’ve all apparently found success in their businesses using these tools and hacks apparently.
So naturally it’s going to wave a magic wand that yours too.
That’s what they think.
So you know, it’s it’s it’s painful to see.
I see all the time.
But the problem is, is that Productivity Tools aren’t going to solve a clarity problem and time blocking isn’t going to solve a strategy problem.
And just working long hours is not going to fix going in the wrong direction with your business.
And so just like any doctor will tell you if you come in sick, you can’t just treat the symptoms.
You need to deal with the underlying course.
And This is why I always come back to, which is why people know me as a small business diagnostician, because I like to diagnose in a business rather than just throw like temporary solutions at the symptoms.
Because in medicine, we know that we could happily just take some drugs to feel better temporarily, but we need to have a difficult conversation or investigate much deeper and deal with the real issues if we really want to get truly better.
But that’s the hard part and it’s definitely not fun.
It’s much easier to just pop a pill and pretend everything’s OK.
But the problem is, you know things will come back to bite you in the arse if you just do that.
So please stop popping pills in your business and deal with the underlying cause to your problems so that you can fix them and move on with a better future.