I moved to a new level of busy after I became the head of engineering for a large organization. My leadership team was no longer first line managers but leaders of their own complex organizations. And with almost 500 engineers under my direction, my schedule quickly filled up. Busy became the new normal. It became harder to manage day to day demands. Problems came in from all directions. I barely had time to digest the first wave before the next would hit. It was frustrating but at the same time exhilarating. Busyness became a bit of a drug. All these meetings and a full schedule carried with it an outsized sense of importance.

As the new year rolled around, I founded a small innovation team. I traded the large organization of 500 for a hand picked team of 10 with a new strategic charter. And with the change, I went from a fully slammed calendar to a completely empty one. 

This should be great right? I had intentionally chosen this new role knowing it would free up my time for strategic thinking. However, I remember thinking “what the heck do I do now?” I was no longer going to endless meetings. But oddly I felt in a bit of a funk. Without all the stuff to do, I had lost a sense of importance. That realization troubled me even more. I knew that being busy didn’t equal to being important, but I had unknowingly equated the two.

It took a few weeks to shift my thinking. Gradually I embraced this new freedom. The hard part was weaning off the immediate feedback cycle that busyness brings. You check something off the list and you immediately feel a sense of accomplishment. The authors of Make Time used the term the “Busy Bandwagon” to describe our propensity to be sucked into endless doing without thinking. The problem is all these tasks don’t necessarily result in getting to the right place in the long term. But the brain just loves finishing tasks. If you have ever experimented with Keto diets or fasting, you can relate. It is like switching from glucose to ketones. One pulls from short term reserves. The other burns fat and is from the longer term reserves.

As our team we made space to think strategically and not give in to being busy for busy sake, we began to see the deeper problems that faced us as a business. We allowed for moments of reflection and rest. This is what Deep Work is all about. This small team became a mighty force within the organization and led to some of the company’s most strategic partnerships and added outsized returns to the business. I am convinced a big part of this was how we all change our relationship to busyness.

The following year, I once took on an expanded role. This time I was charged with leading three additional complex organizations with one of them Venmo engineering. In total I now had 750 team members. This was the real test. Making time was more straightforward within the small team. Here I set the agenda. But now I had the demands of the complexity of operations. But I was determined not to fall back into the busy trap. I constantly challenged the reason behind every meeting and process. Time had become the most valuable resource and it couldn’t be wasted. I had to be driven by first principle thinking and not just by running a process.

In the prior complex role, I had a problem with sustaining a high level of quality. When faced with issues, we aimed meetings and process at the issues. Busyness was the rule of the day. But even with all the effort, quality remained elusive. However, in this new and even more complex organization, quality became easier to achieve and maintain. Why?

Our relationship with time had changed. Instead of seeing it as a commodity to spend on busyness, we saw it as a precious resource to invest in our people and our thinking. The dividends began to pay off quickly. We had time to attack the systemic issues and instead of going for the immediate fix (which the organization was demanding through a host of vanity metrics), we went deeper. We embraced the longer term thinking cycle.

It is a lesson I keep learning. Busyness is a bit of a drug. It can make you feel important by a false sense of accomplishment. But what you accomplish may not be truly important in the end. As leaders we need to be constantly asking why we do what we do. We need to be very wary of the trap of busyness.

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