Too Busy or Not Busy Enough?

When busyness becomes a destructive habit

00:00Bill Gallagher: Have you ever had a week when you're completely slammed, but somehow nothing actually moved? Is this one of those weeks? That's not really a time problem. It's a busyness habit problem. My new book, Busy Is Broken, Do Less, Scale More is all about growing by doing less, not more. Read or listen to a sample chapter over at busyisbroken.com. That's busyisbroken.com. It's also on Amazon and other booksellers.

00:28Bill Gallagher: Really curious about being too busy. I've been thinking a lot about this lately. When are we too busy? When are we not busy? Look, I work with busy people. I'm a busy person. Somebody asked me yesterday, are you still busy? Are you retired? No, I'm really busy. Pretty much everyone I'm working with is busy. I think listeners, viewers here, you're busy, but when are you too busy and when is busy healthy and when is too busy mean and how do you fix it? So I think there are times where you're too busy and you probably get tired, and there are times where you think you need to be busy or busier than you actively are.

01:17Bill Gallagher: I think both things are going on all the time. There's like a level of busyness, but busyness, like activity, for activity's sake, because we have an emotional need, we have guilt, we're driven, we're worried about things, is probably never healthy. So what is good, what isn't good, I think fundamentally I'm talking to busy people, right, but let's have the right kind of busy. Let's be busy in the way that you design intent that fulfills all your intentions, but not the kind of busy that has unintended consequences.

A CEO who slept three hours and lost everything

01:49Bill Gallagher: So let me show you a couple of examples, a couple people that I coached that I think really exemplified the wrong kind of busy and what happens with it. So you know when you're too busy, it means you're not sleeping well. There's health impacts. You know that your thinking gets frazzled. You know that you don't have as much fun, that you get cranky. You have some variation of all of these things. I do. I think we all do. Right? So you know that that's obvious. I was coaching a guy, I'll call him Eddie, just to keep it anonymous so that he doesn't get the pressure, but a tech CEO. He really needed to get a win. He felt the pressure. He wasn't confident yet in his role. He had bought the company and he had a business background, but it wasn't in that specific role with that kind of company in that industry and so on. And so he wasn't confident.

02:48Bill Gallagher: He got really busy. He tried to sleep like only two, maybe three nights, three hours a night for like several years. As soon as I found out about it, I talked to him about it. I encouraged him to stop doing it. We talked about it, but he kept doing it. And the result of it on the personal side is pretty obvious. So he got foggy, he gained weight, he stopped having as much fun, his family got divided, his marriage failed, his family was divided, so there's all that, right? So sleeplessness, health effects, gaining weight, family impacts, right? And that's a big deal, like your family splits up, right? So we know carried on long enough, and yet he felt like he still had to do it because he wasn't winning. And in fact, the more busy, the more he tried to work, the worse things got. It didn't get better.

03:49Bill Gallagher: So I think that in that case what we're missing is it's the wrong kind of busy and it's having some business effects you're not clear about. So let's take the case that something like that has happened or will happen to you at some point. It's for sure happened to me, as well as some of my clients. In that case, you will start to see some other effects. So his people started to get upset, frustrated, the morale went down, there was a decline in morale, there started to be more churn. New people they brought in didn't turn out, had to leave before they had realized what they were brought in for, and people who'd been around the company for some years left because it wasn't fun anymore. He took ordinary basic things that were out of his domain and he meddled in them. So he became a micromanager. He got involved in every part of the business because he felt like personal responsibility is the CEO, and it ultimately caused the company to fail. So the company failed and was sold off in parts, and he was highly resistant the whole time through the coaching. It failed after we stopped coaching the company, but you know, it doesn't—I failed as a coach because I didn't manage to interrupt the behavior, right?

05:11Bill Gallagher: So there's one example, one story. You see the personal side first, the business side catches you off guard. So when you get too busy, you're involved in too many things, you're doing things you shouldn't do, your people aren't doing the things that they want to do, and they get annoyed, frustrated, irritated because you're in their business doing their things and not letting them work it out. So teams diminish, results diminish, things get worse. You keep trying to do more hard work, and ultimately, like in the case of Eddie, failure of big personal—no, Eddie's still alive. People are all still alive. Business was sold off. The customers and things are being handled in a new way. But Eddie had huge impacts in his life, in his career, to his business and so on. You don't want that.

Micromanagement kills morale and results

05:58Bill Gallagher: So there is definitely a kind of too busy and a pattern that you can get in and a reason that you can get there. Let me give you another example. Also a new CEO. I'll call this guy Rocky. So this company goes, it's a breakout company, this company goes from inception to $2 billion valuation. Rocky's working in the company, comes in to take over from the founder, and they start to have some real challenges. So Rocky tries to be superman. And Rocky starts flying all around the world, visiting all the offices, meeting with customers, things like that, keeping unbelievable hours. And I would say Rocky was involved in a kind of a different kind of micromanagement, but still trying to be Superman to the thing instead of letting the people do. In Rocky's case, I don't really know what the personal effects were. I imagine that it's stress and family impacts and things like that, but I don't actually know. What I do know is that Rocky's thinking, his quality of the company's strategy declined, and people were working on too many things. So they opened up too many fronts, they tried to do too many things. He's involved in everything, which meant that everything sort of had to wait for his participation, everything of consequence. All the big things had to wait for his participation because he's like everywhere. And people got frazzled because they'd get like emails at two, three in the morning to have ready for a 9 a.m. meeting and you know so they'd wake up at five or 6 a.m. and they'd see this and their whole day would be frazzled.

07:34Bill Gallagher: Things like that were starting to happen. This company goes from up to $2 billion and then down to less than $150 million and is sold off in parts. You know, things changed in the company though. The world changed, the strategy, but the reason they didn't overcome, I say, looking at it—I mean, you could feel it at the time, but now looking at it more clearly is that he was trying to be Superman, right? And he was trying to go everywhere, and not only did the impact of the team was degraded, but the strategy was compromised, and so they're all doing too much and with him having—and their bandwidth was limited because he has to be involved in everything, and the failing I think in Rocky's case, he might say differently, but I think the failing is not looking in the mirror. So in his case, he wanted me to coach everyone but him. So he wants me in everybody else's business but him. And I think this is a common kind of thing. If you notice that you'd like a consultant, a coach, or somebody to work on the people that are a problem in your company to help you, and you maybe got the wrong people or that kind of thing, and you're not taking a look in the mirror, that's a real issue.

Refusing to look in the mirror compounds the damage

08:50Bill Gallagher: It's a struggle because nobody wants to think it's their fault, but it's also like, to take a look at the mirror, things are not going well in your life, your business. Looking in the mirror is the most powerful way, because even though it's no fun for it to be your fault, you can do something about you. It's easier to impact you than everyone else. And if you could see that you are the originator of it.

09:17Bill Gallagher: So, too busy. You're busy. But when busy becomes a racket, like a cop-out thing you say, "Oh yeah, I'm so busy right now. Oh, I'm busy," maybe take some time off, maybe step back. If you're involved in decisions that are worth less than $10,000, maybe that's not something you should be involved in. What is it that you could say? Where are you meddling in things, in the people? Where are you not taking time?

09:43Bill Gallagher: I'll talk about it in subsequent ones, but there are a lot of great examples of leaders of really well-known companies, as well as some of the ones that we've coached, that either just got the message from the beginning. They were an empowerment, they were a healthy, balanced kind of a leader right from the get-go. And then there are other people that have had transformations.

10:02Bill Gallagher: I'll talk about some of those in some upcoming episodes. But when you have a transformation, you see something about yourself and you shift as the leader, then all the work that we do in strategy, in getting your execution dialed, in dialing in the team, the people actually stick around. The people level up because you're not being too busy, you're not micromanaging, you're not kind of a frazzled, not clear-thinking, unhealthy sort of a person.

Leading as your most powerful, rested self

10:24Bill Gallagher: Think about being your most powerful self. You're rested, your fitness is great, you've eaten well, your romantic relationship is in good shape, your family, your fun, your hobbies, your friends. You're a whole person with a whole rich, diverse things. And all of those things bear in on and give support to your ability to lead powerfully, right? Then your people are all encouraged to have similar kinds of lives, and they're all leading their best selves, doing their best work. And it's not about doing a million hours a week and not getting any sleep and that kind of thing. That's not sustainable.

11:01Bill Gallagher: There will be times, right? I'll talk about it in a future episode. There will be times that if you were the COO of a big rocket company, where something would blow up and you'd need to huddle up and put in some extra hours to figure it out, or leading up to a launch or that kind of thing. But then other times where your launches would want to be routine, right? And so our day-to-day life shouldn't all be crisis all the time, no sleep, all stress, like that kind of thing, until you die. Life is hard.

11:31Bill Gallagher: Whether you're a CEO, a COO, whatever, any level of leader, or whether you're digging ditches or working in the service industry, or whatever level kind of life you live, it's all going to be hard. What makes it less of a thing is when you're powerful, when you're effective, when you're rested, when you're clear-thinking, when you're doing your best work, right? And as a leader, our work is amplified and rippled across so many other people, because we touch and interact and we're the focal point for a lot of things when we're doing our best work.

12:06Bill Gallagher: So, where could you carve out a little more time in your day? Where could you let your people go a little bit? What's one thing that you could do this week to bring a little bit more balance into your life? A decision you could step out of, a meeting you could untangle yourself from, a matter that you could let the team sort itself out in? That would be my coaching for you this week. Look for what you could do. I hope that's helpful. We'll talk to you again next time. In the meantime, keep scaling.

12:35Bill Gallagher: Thanks for listening today. One last thing: if anything in this episode hit home, my book digs into it further. Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More. It's all about how to stop drowning in work and build a business and a team that scales without you. Available right now with content samples at busyisbroken.com. Go grab it. Be less busy.