Your 7-Step Playbook to Replace Busywork With Real Results

Episode #366 Your 7-Step Playbook to Replace Busywork With Real Results

“BUSY” IS THE ENEMY OF PRODUCTIVE

They say that if you want to look busy and important, all you need to do is walk briskly, carry a clipboard, and frown slightly.

That’s classic advice from Dilbert, which many leaders embrace metaphorically, if not literally. But over the years, I came to realise that busy is the enemy of productive.

A huge amount of what our teams do every day delivers no value whatsoever. It’s organisational white noise that serves only to distract us, and create the impression that we’re doing something worthwhile.

Although that might seem harmless enough, this low-value work is incredibly counterproductive. Why? Because it gets in the way, and it stops us from nailing the results that potentially deliver the most value.

If you can’t get people to focus on the right things and eliminate this noise, performance will always be substandard… no matter how productive your people may seem.

In this newsletter, I drill into how you can change this culture of busyness at the expense of value.

I explain why there’s no virtue in busyness for its own sake; I build out the foundations of this philosophy by integrating some of the great business literature with my own experiences; and I give you my 7-step playbook for eliminating low value, meaningless busy work so that you can focus your team on the highest value deliverables.

WE’RE RAISED TO BE DILIGENT

From a very young age, I was taught that to be busy is virtuous. Even though I was brought up Catholic, I was instilled with the Protestant work ethic. This principle was reinforced with the sort of scary sh!t that gets kids to willingly comply: like the often-used Biblical quote, “Idle hands are the devil’s playground.”

I don’t know what young kids are being taught these days, but I suspect it’s not really all that different. I look at my two nieces in Boston, Isabella and Victoria. One is a sophomore in college, the other a junior in high school. They both have huge work ethics, and they’ve been conditioned from a young age to dedicate themselves to achieving worthwhile goals.

By the time we hit our first job, we’ve already been conditioned to believe that ‘busy’ is good.

Then, our bosses tell us that we have to do more with less… to constantly look for efficiencies… to remove the fat, so that we can get through more work.

This has encouraged leaders, at all levels, to get the principles of performance and value delivery totally wrong. They think that if they just keep piling the work on, they’ll get their people to reach optimum capacity.

What’s the natural reaction of that leader when one of their people breaks, or when something is not delivered as expected? “Well, we got further than we would’ve if I hadn’t pushed them so hard.”

This is all sorts of wrong. It fundamentally misses the point of what it means to be resource constrained.

The only thing I know for certain about where you’re working right now is that you’ll never have enough time, money, or people to do all the things that you would ideally like to do. This is why we have to make choices.

If you don’t understand value in a profound way, you’ll most likely make poor choices, which will reverberate through your team.

The volume of work your team delivers is a very poor proxy for value. Unless you learn to differentiate between all the possible work initiatives that your people could undertake, based on the relative value of each, you’re going to struggle to get any real traction.

And, a more subtle problem is that if you just keep piling the work on, you’ll never get a sense of your team’s true capability and capacity. Why? Because you never really work out what’s been missed.

Sure, you’ll see the big misses, like the stuff that flat out wasn’t delivered. But everything else is sort-of, maybe half-delivered. It has almost certainly been compromised in some way: there may have been some shortcuts taken with quality… or some expedient decisions taken to remove some of the scope… you just don’t know where those compromises have been made.

This principle operates exactly the same way with suppliers. We always think it’s better to squeeze our suppliers harder, both contractually and operationally to get more out of them for less. But if you squeeze them too hard, you’re going to force them to look for shortcuts.

And when they do, you won’t even know where those shortcuts are being taken… until it’s too late.

NO ONE SAYS “NO”

How do these team dynamics play out, specifically? The root cause of this problem is that no one says “no”.

The reasons for this are complex. Yes, we’re driven by the fact that we should do more with less… and, yes, the Protestant work ethic persists…

But, on top of this, you want to be thought of highly.

You want to please the people above you and get their attention.

You want to be seen as a can-do person.

So, your tendency is going to be to say “yes” to everything that’s asked of you, even when you know deep down that it’s unlikely you’ll be able to get it done.

And we work out pretty quickly that it’s easier to have that discussion with your boss on the back end, by having all the reasons why your team didn’t manage to deliver, than it is to argue why you shouldn’t take on the work in the first place.

Yet, still, you hope it might get done. And as we all know, hope is not a strategy.

The way it plays out is a little more complex though:

• You start each year with a work program, which has been built on last year’s work program;
• You baseline your business-as-usual activities according to the people you have employed at that time (don’t get me started on this one!);
• You add in all the things you said you’d do last year, but didn’t quite get around to delivering;
• Then you add any stuff that’s come as part of the new strategic priorities from your board and executive team.

What you’ll end up with is the stuff you did last year… the stuff you didn’t do last year, but said you would… and the new stuff that people above you want to do on top of that.

Once you have those plans in place, which are unrealistic, by definition, you then have to be prepared to take on all the stuff that comes up in the general run of play: The stuff your boss says has to be done. Everyone knows that this is the way life normally pans out in an organisation, so most plans are built with a lot of slack in them to start with.

But optimism bias and the pile-on of new work soaks this slack up pretty quickly.

So, when the boss comes and says, “I need you to do this – it’s a priority one request from above.” And you say, “We can’t. We already have six priority ones”, there’s nothing in place, culturally or physically, that would lead your boss to say anything other than, “Just do it.”

He becomes the Nike boss. And what’s happening on the other side of the ledger?

Well, people are generally happy to be busy. They don’t necessarily think of the potential value being delivered, because when people are busy, they feel utilised. When they feel utilised, they feel necessary. And when they feel necessary, they feel secure.

THE PUSH TO VALUE OVER ACTIVITY IS INCREASING

There’s been a very welcome push towards doing less work and at the same time achieving greater value for the organisation you work for. To lead successfully, it’s vital to adopt this mindset: to use the resources you’ve been gifted by your organisation, to create as much long-term value as possible.

The philosophy of focusing on the things that matter most and eliminating distractions started in earnest well over 10 years ago, with the publication of Chris McChesney’s book, The Four Disciplines of Execution.

McChesney and his co-authors observed that most organisations fail simply because they try to do too much. Instead, he concluded that it’s way more effective to do less and place a laser-like focus on a few wildly important goals.

If you read the book, you’re going to wonder why you ever believe that taking on more and more work could be an effective tool for value creation.

More recently, I came across an article in the Wall Street Journal titled, Less is More: The Case for Slow Productivity at Work. The article looks at a book by Cal Newport titled Slow Productivity.

According to Newport, “busy” comes in a lot of different forms. We waste an inordinate amount of time in meetings that produce no outcomes, or that we shouldn’t be attending in the first place. We spend countless hours on email and our internal direct messaging systems.

Newport says that we take on too many projects, then get bogged down in administrative overload. That is, we spend a lot of time talking about the work, and coordinating the work. Our day becomes a string of planning meetings, waiting on someone from another department to give us a go-ahead to do something.

If this is done for a critical project that really moves the needle – a wildly important goal – then it’s worth it.

But we try to collaborate on everything and very little of it delivers high-value outcomes. Of course, if you want to shrink your workload in order to focus on delivering the biggest bang for buck, you have to position it with those above you who still think you should be playing the volume game.

You don’t want to seem like every request is a burden… and you don’t want to get a reputation for being the department of “no”.

What you have to communicate is that you are absolutely relentless in finding more effective ways to deliver value for the team and the company.

So, be positive and deliver on the timelines you promise. This is how you do less, and still be seen as someone who delivers; someone who’s on top of their game.

Newport’s final word on the matter is this:

“You have to be really good at the part of your job that matters, and you have to get big stuff done. Remember, this is about being a happier high performer. It’s not about slacking off.”

HOW TO MEASURE THE VALUE YOUR TEAM CREATES

We’re running a free workshop in a couple of weeks’ time: The First 90 Days at Any New Level: How to win trust, build credibility, and deliver results.

The notion of doing less, low-value work so that you can eliminate the noise and really unlock value is a core principle. It’s the number one thing you need to get a handle on, and it’s the thing that will most set you apart from the crowd.

One of the best frameworks that I think I’ve managed to articulate, in terms of value, is the concept of the Value Delivery Rating. I described it succinctly in one of my recent mini episodes, Moments with Marty. It was Moment #131: What’s Your Team’s Value Delivery Rating? We released it on the 28th of July 2025, and you can find it on your favorite podcast player.

Just to recap though: To understand your team’s value delivery rating, just ask yourself two simple questions:

1. Are we working on the right things? And
2. How productive are we in delivering them?

If you rate your team for each question, in percentage terms, and then multiply them together, you’ll get an idea of how close you are to that notional 100% traction (which of course, is unattainable).

For example, if your team only worked on the most critical things, you might rate them as 90% effective.

If they also work at their ultimate productive state, you might rate them as, say, 90% efficient.

If you multiply those two together, you arrive at a Value Delivery Rating for the team: in this case 81% (90% x 90%).

Obviously, this is just a wet-finger-in-the-air exercise, but if you are brutally honest, it can be incredibly revealing.

What if you could make your people more productive? That would increase your team’s efficiency rating. To do this, you’d have to do a lot of leadership work: setting expectations; driving accountability; providing support and mentorship; making decisions; and countless difficult conversations.

Good leaders spend a lot of their day trying to do just this, and rightly so.

But if you are not working on the right things, that additional productivity comes to nothing. Making your team 90% productive would be awesome, if you could do it. It’s almost unheard of. But if their alignment to the highest value work isn’t solid, you’ll squander all that good work.

Imagine if your team was only 50% effective… even with a 90% productivity rating, you wouldn’t even get a pass mark.

I’m going to go into this in a lot more detail in the workshop, which is absolutely free, so I certainly hope you can join me.

YOUR 7-STEP PLAYBOOK TO UNCOVERING VALUE

Here’s my seven-step playbook to help you flip the script. This is going to tell you exactly how to stop busywork from strangling value in your team.

1. Get buy-in from your boss.

Before you even start the work, you want to get agreement from your boss that you won’t get overruled when you try to focus on higher value work, at the expense of meaningless volume. Once the boss agrees that you can focus solely on the big ticket items, you can push ahead with some level of confidence.

2. Know where the value is (and know how to communicate it clearly).

Unless you can clearly articulate what the highest value initiatives are, you’ll find it hard to demonstrate superior value to your boss, which means you’ll find it hard to resist any request to deliver more. And your boss’s recollection of the agreement you reached in step 1 will be fleeting.

It takes a lot of work to get extreme clarity on the relative value of each potential resource allocation, and that is the hard work of leadership.

3. Reinforce this message daily by saying “no” to dumb sh!t.

You, the leaders below you, and every person on your team has to get comfortable with the word “no”. You don’t say “no” as an excuse for laziness or lack of compliance. It’s just a natural part of the conversation that says, “We’re doing something bigger here; we’re being disciplined and sticking to the things that we know are going to make the most difference to the company.”

4. Don’t let your people pick up pet projects.

People love to work on the things they love to work on. Sometimes it’s because the work is challenging. Sometimes it’s because the work isn’t challenging. Sometimes it’s just the rusted-on activity that they’re afraid to let go of, because it fills a significant portion of their day.

Your first best bet for not having your resources squandered on low-value work is to not let it get on the work program in the first place.

You have to be ruthless in the annual planning cycle. In most organisations, once something becomes a budget line item with money and people allocated to it, it will happen.

5. Focus on stopping low value work (not introducing more of it!)

The hardest thing I ever had to do as a corporate executive was to stop the things that had already started. They get a life of their own. People become attached to the work.

Often, when they sense an initiative is in danger of being canned, it finds its way underground. They keep working on it – but you just can’t see it anymore.

You have to be ruthless in shutting down low value work, and you have to be prepared to do the hard work with your people that this might necessitate.

6. Hold your people to account for delivering what they’ve promised.

If you don’t have a strong accountability cadence, where people are expected to deliver on their commitments, you’ll leave the door open for all sorts of downstream problems.

If there’s no accountability, it’s easy for your team to get distracted by low value work, and it’s easy to make excuses for not delivering on the really critical stuff. In a strong, single-point accountability culture, this isn’t quite as easy. People get used to the mantra, No Blame, No Excuses. If you just do what you said you’d do, then that shouldn’t leave much time to do low-value work.

7. It’s not over until you hear the sound of the coin hitting the tin.

This whole approach only works if you can clearly show the superior outcomes that this approach enables. So be tenacious, not just in delivering the work, but also making sure the benefits are tracked and recovered.

You have to be able to demonstrate that this philosophy of delivering better outcomes with less effort is worth it for you, for the team, for your boss, and for the company.

THE SECRET TO DELIVERING REAL VALUE

These seven steps will help you to move from flying by the seat of your pants and not really tracking true outcomes, to being methodical, consistent, and confident about the value your team’s producing.

Our upcoming workshop on how to manage your first 90 days in any new role is going to drill into this and other principles much more deeply.

If you want to improve your confidence and achieve genuine high performance, this is one of the key pieces of the puzzle. 

At the end of the day, you are going to be judged purely on your results; and those results won’t come unless you have the confidence to replace your team’s busy work with the things that deliver real value.