Are You Addicted to Being Busy?

Busyness is an addiction, not productivity

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: All right. I'm going to say it. You're not hustling and grinding. You're just addicted to being busy. The secret benefits of stepping back is what I want to share with you today. Imagine this: you take a week off or a month even, no conference calls, no interventions, no client calls. What happens? Does your business crumble or does it thrive in ways that you never expected?

00:54Bill Gallagher: Here's the thing. Stepping back from your business isn't just about self-care. It's a leadership strategy all in itself. And the leaders who've mastered it, they're not just surviving. They're scaling better, stronger with more resilience, stronger teams than the rest of us are. So I want to dig in now to why doing less might actually help you achieve more.

Fitness CEO who keeps date night and strong team

01:19Bill Gallagher: Let me tell you a couple of different stories. I've got a CEO that I worked with recently, of a fitness business. This guy's got a great life. He's got date night on the regular. He's got time for his kids and family. He's got time for his friends and his hobbies. He's in great shape. Of course, he's in the fitness business, right? So he ought to be in great shape. His team though is among the strongest that I've worked with in many years. His team are doers. They step up, they get the job done. And from time to time, there's a person on the team who isn't stepping up. Right? What does he do? He gives them a nudge. He says, come on, man. You can do this. I believe in you. I know you got it. I need to see more from you. I need to see a better effort, a better focus, like whatever. Right? He pushes them a little. Sometimes they step up. Sometimes they don't. What happens if they don't? He lets them go. Right? But he doesn't step in and fill all the gaps for people all the time and ruin his life, his fitness, his romance, his family life, his fun, his friendships. Right? He doesn't take the joy out of his life.

02:26Bill Gallagher: And in doing that, he actually creates opportunities for his people to step up and he has no tolerance for people who don't step up. If it's clear that you're not stepping up on the team, you don't stay on that team for very long. And that's the difference. Too many times we fill in for people. They either hold back or they don't ever have to drive. And we're exhausted and we can't get away from the business and we're solving every problem. And they come to us because they're used to it because we've trained them to do that. Mostly unconsciously, right? You didn't start out to be the kind of boss who ruins your life and disempowers your team, but we often end up that way. And then we tell people because it's in our culture, I'm hustling and grinding. In truth, we have an addiction to being busy.

Output matters more than hours logged

03:14Bill Gallagher: I worked with a guy many years ago, a very different guy in the early point of my career, who was always calling in from the beach to give his daily reports and stuff. He's like, I'm double my quota. I'm taking the time off. I'm going to the beach this afternoon. It's a great day. Right? He was very much about productivity, exceeding his number that he needed from a plan standpoint and from what he needed personally for his ego, lifestyle, that kind of thing. And then taking some great time off, right? This is early on. And I learned from him as an example that I don't always match up to, that the productivity is far more important than the busyness, but we have a way of saying like, how are you doing? Oh man, I'm so busy right now. It's great though. It's great to be busy. Yes, it is. We feel useful. We feel like it's not okay to not be busy. It's not okay to take a two-hour lunch and linger and think about and appreciate our lives and take a walk around the block without handling a phone call or whatever. But just look up into the trees or listen to the birds. Don't allow ourselves that. And yet there's actually a cost on the business.

04:23Bill Gallagher: Years ago, my wife and I were in the middle of a really significant business challenge. And when we realized that our kids were hitting an age where we promised ourselves that we were going to blow out, that we were going to go take months and years off. Not really. We wanted to just make sure that we had enough time when our kids hit a certain age. And really it was the time between 10 and 14. Between 10 and 14, we thought, and we decided in our view that that's when kids would remember the travel and the time the most and appreciate it. And they weren't yet too much into the teen years where they didn't want us in their lives at all when a lot of kids spend time hating their parents. Anyway, so now we're in the middle of the challenge and we see this time approaching and I'm like, I can't take a month off. I can't take the summer off. I can't take a year off. I can't even get away for two weeks without being locked into various calls and meetings and things like that in our business. Like, we're just too small of a company. Right? And so we looked at each other, we said, you know what? No matter what, next year when summer comes around, we're going to take the summer off. And, now look, some cultures in some places that's a normal kind of thing, but it wasn't and it isn't in North America for the most part, certainly not in the United States. We just don't work that way. It's not the way we're wired, not the way our companies are run in general. So it was kind of extraordinary. You know, it's true in Europe and some other parts of the world that that might be a lot more normal, but for us it just really wasn't. It was going to take something.

Committing to take a month off in Italy

06:08Bill Gallagher: Now I already had learned Scaling Up. I'm already practicing Scaling Up. Have meetings, great weeklies and Daily Huddles and dashboards and scorecards. We do quarterly planning, strategy work, all that stuff. We're already doing it. And yet I still can't take the time off. Right? Why is that? Because of the way I was as a leader. So I looked at the mirror and I looked at my people. I looked at the way I work and I said, for me to do this, people have to learn to act without me. They have to learn to think on their own and to be confident. And I have to be confident in them. They have to be confident in themselves. They have to know how to act against the values of the company and against the plans of the company without my solving every problem. We need more of an ownership mindset. I've heard that so many times from other CEOs.

06:54Bill Gallagher: So I'm like, okay, I have to deal with me. So I just started reminding myself every day and every way. I put physical reminders around my office, don't solve the problem, ask another question, ask what to do, ask what ideas they have, various reminders. And I kept changing them. And for about ten months I made a concerted effort to stop solving problems for people. So people came in my office and they came in with a challenge. And I said instead, what are you going to do when I'm not here? Well, how would you solve this if I wasn't here today? Because next summer I'm not going to be here.

07:28Bill Gallagher: And slowly but surely, we trained each other. I trained myself and I trained them not to have me solve every problem, to have the confidence to go ahead and make some decisions on their own without my intervention, and decisions that I would be proud of, that we'd all be proud of at the end of the day, and how to communicate with each other and so on. And then summer finally arrived, kids got out of school. We went to Italy for a whole month. Now it wasn't the whole summer. It was just a month, but it was a month where I wasn't solving problems. I got a daily report from my team in my email and I could see that things were fine. I got a picture of the dashboard and some facts, and then I got a little extended thing every week, and everything was fine. And the company started to operate on its own without my daily interventions and things.

Building a business that runs without you

08:21Bill Gallagher: When I came back at the end of that trip, I was involved and engaged in lots of different things, but I never had to go back to being that hands-on, domineering, fixing-every-problem kind of CEO again. And I was able to start to extricate myself in coaching from running that company and go on to coaching. It's one of the things that led to it. So this whole addiction to being busy is something that you could train yourself out of. It can make a difference.

08:49Bill Gallagher: So in doing it, you will empower your teams. You will bring more innovation. You'll create more ownership mindset. People will level up. They'll be proud of their own work. They'll see their careers progressing, which will lead to more good work and better retention and better employee morale. And it creates a more sustainable growth and an organization that is saleable. Like you could leave that kind of a business.

09:15Bill Gallagher: Here's the thing. There's so much opportunity in this kind of thing. Think about my fitness CEO now. Think about that trip that I took to Italy. Think about then how you work and what it would take for you to start to shift the way that you act as a leader. You've heard the tools. If you've been watching, listening to the show, or you've spent some time now going to it, you'll hear about dashboards and scorecards and picking the right metrics and balancing metrics and leading and lagging metrics. And you'll hear about quarterly planning and annual strategy work. You'll hear about the Four D meeting for the weekly, and you'll hear about daily huddles, and you'll hear about process, like all that stuff.

Look in the mirror and shift your leadership

09:56Bill Gallagher: But then take a long, hard look in the mirror and think about the way that you work and think about the kind of stuff that you really should be doing and what your team should be doing. And stop complaining about your team and instead start shifting the way that you work to create opportunities for them to step up and to sustain that performance over time. That'll make the real difference. That's the kind of thing that we're talking about here, right? Business owners, again and again, way too hard, but still feel stuck, feel like they're running in place, feel like they're not leveling up. We want you to help build a strong team, right? That starts with shifting the way you work so that you can scale with ease and grow your business, grow a big, huge business, a global business, a billion dollar business. I've done multiple billion dollar businesses, right? And regularly do businesses in the hundreds of millions with exits for CEOs.

10:51Bill Gallagher: Almost every year we have at least one like that. You can grow a business like that without sacrificing your life. It's a business that you'll really be proud of and you'll be proud of yourself in the mirror. You can forever change the way you lead as a leader and the kind of business that you create. I hope that's helpful for you. I hope it helps you to scale your business with a better life and a business that you're truly proud of. We'll talk to you again next time. In the meantime, keep scaling.

11:20Bill 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.