Your calendar is full. Is your business growing? Episode 19 of ZilckSound, "Busy Is Not a Business Model," takes on a question most of us avoid: how much of our effort produces results, and how much only looks like work?
The Comfort of Being Busy
Busyness is easy to measure. You can count meetings, unread messages, and hours logged. Results are harder to pin down, so many of us settle for the number we can see.
Harvard Business Review described this years ago in "The Busyness Trap." Tony Schwartz recounts MBA students who admitted that part of their success came from creating the illusion of hard work. One group left their suit jackets draped over their chairs so it looked like they were still in the building. That is busyness working as a performance, and it is a poor strategy for running a company.
What the Research Says
The evidence against "more hours, more output" is solid. Stanford economist John Pencavel studied British munitions workers and found a nonlinear relationship between hours and output. Below a threshold, output tracks hours. Above it, output rises at a decreasing rate.
In his data, that threshold sat around 49 weekly hours, and output peaked at about 63. Schedules of 60 hours or more were associated with "decreased productivity and increased absences, accidents, and labor turnover." Pencavel also found that denying workers a day of rest cost about ten percent of output.
Popular summaries put it more bluntly. CNBC reported that people working up to 70 hours a week get about as much done as those working 55. The same article quotes Stanford scholar Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, author of Rest: "Busyness is not a means to accomplishment, but an obstacle to it."
One caution applies. Pencavel's data comes from World War I factories, and he notes that the curve's shape varies across workers and types of work. Knowledge work is harder to measure than shells produced per shift. The direction of the finding still matches what many founders feel but don't say out loud.
Busy as a Leadership Problem
Busyness also spreads. HBR's guidance on time management warns that when leaders don't control their own time, they overload their teams and create unnecessary emergencies. It cites a SHRM survey in which 84% of workers said poorly trained managers create unnecessary work and stress.
So a frantic founder doesn't only hurt their own output. They set the tempo for everyone else. A team that sees urgency rewarded will manufacture urgency.
From Busy to Built
A business model explains how value is created, delivered, and captured. Busyness explains none of that, and it's best treated as a symptom. Here are five questions to test your own week:
- Which three outcomes would make this week a success, regardless of how many tasks I finish?
- What can I stop doing without anyone noticing a decline in results?
- Where am I the bottleneck, and what would it take to delegate that decision?
- Which recurring meeting has no clear owner, purpose or decision?
- When did I last rest long enough to think strategically?
Systems matter as much as intentions. Managers who thrive tend to categorize tasks, delegate, and tie daily work to strategic priorities, instead of reacting to whatever is loudest, as one HBR-based summary frames it. That secondary source is worth checking against the original HBR article.
Press Play
If your inbox is full and your growth is flat, Episode 19 may be worth 30 minutes of your attention. ZilckSound promises "sharp ideas and bold stories that make you think differently about the business world," and this topic suits that description.
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