Busy Isn't a Strategy
I remember weeks when every hour was accounted for and I still ended Friday feeling like I’d accomplished nothing.
Back-to-back meetings from 7am. Decisions made on the fly between calls. A hundred emails that all felt urgent. A strategy deck that kept getting pushed to next week because there was never enough time to actually think.
Here’s what I told myself during those stretches: I’m working hard. I’m responsive. I’m present.
What I didn’t tell myself — what I couldn’t see from inside the machine — was that I had confused motion with progress. That the relentless busyness wasn’t a sign of effective leadership. It was a sign of the Focus Fallacy taking hold.
The Focus Problem at the Top
The Focus Fallacy is one of the ten blind spots that lead to burnout that I explore in Crash and [Burn] LEARN. It’s the pattern of mistaking activity for impact — filling your calendar and your cognitive bandwidth with things that feel productive, while the work that actually moves the needle keeps getting deferred.
It’s more common at the executive level than most leaders want to admit. And the research backs that up.
Harvard Business School professors Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria spent over a decade tracking how CEOs actually spend their time — logging nearly 60,000 hours across 27 chief executives. What they found was striking. About 36% of CEO time was spent in reactive mode, handling unfolding issues rather than driving the agenda forward. The average CEO had 37 meetings per week and spent 72% of working hours in those meetings.
Meetings. Responses. Reviews. Emails. All of it feels like work. Some of it genuinely is. But the Harvard team also found that CEOs who failed to protect time for strategic thinking — the work only they could do — were consistently less effective and more likely to report feeling overwhelmed.
That’s the Focus Fallacy in action. Not laziness. Not lack of effort. The opposite: relentless effort, misdirected.
Why Busyness Feels Like Safety
Real talk: busyness is comfortable in a way that strategic clarity is not.
When your calendar is full, you have a ready answer to any question about how you’re spending your time. You’re in demand. You’re needed. The proof is right there in the back-to-back blocks of color on your schedule.
Strategic focus requires something harder. It requires saying no to things that feel important in the moment. It requires protecting time that looks, to everyone else, like empty space. It requires tolerating the discomfort of sitting with a hard question long enough to actually think it through — instead of jumping to the next meeting where you can feel useful again.
Wharton research put it plainly: executives who embrace busyness as a badge of pride, cramming professional effort into every corner of their lives, produce work that not only doesn’t equate to enhanced performance — it’s also detrimental to their health and their relationships.
And yet the culture persists. Because in most organizations, being busy still looks like being valuable. The leader who is always in demand, always available, always on — that leader looks committed. The leader who protects blocks of uninterrupted thinking time looks like they have too much free time.
We’ve built systems that reward the appearance of productivity over actual impact. And executives, who are as susceptible to social approval as anyone, fall into the trap.
What Gets Crowded Out
Here’s what the busyness costs you — beyond the personal toll.
Strategy. The Porter and Nohria study found that the CEO’s single most powerful lever is ensuring every unit of the organization has a clear, well-defined strategy. But strategy requires sustained, uninterrupted thinking. It requires the ability to zoom out, hold complexity, and make deliberate choices about what you will and won’t do. That kind of thinking doesn’t happen in the margins between meetings.
When strategic clarity erodes — because there’s never enough time to develop it — organizations start making decisions by default instead of by design. The CEO gets pulled deeper into operational firefighting, which generates more reactive meetings, which crowds out more strategic time. The cycle compounds.
People development suffers too. The Harvard data showed that effective CEOs spent significant time in one-on-one conversations with direct reports — not reviews, not group briefings, but genuine developmental investment. That’s the work that builds organizational resilience over time. It’s also the first thing that gets cut when the calendar is overloaded.
And then there’s the personal cost. The cognitive exhaustion of context-switching at high velocity all day. The inability to actually rest when you stop — because the brain has been trained to stay in reactive mode. The slow erosion of the capacity for deep thought that is, ironically, the most valuable thing you have to offer.
Getting Your Focus Back
The shift starts with an honest audit. Not a productivity hack. Not a new app. A genuine reckoning with how your time is actually being spent versus how it needs to be spent.
Ask yourself: in the last month, how many uninterrupted hours did I spend on the strategic questions only I can answer? Not reviewing, not reacting, not facilitating — actually thinking about where this organization is going and why.
For most executives I work with, the answer is uncomfortable. Because the honest number is usually much lower than they expected.
The fix isn’t to work harder. It’s to work with more intentional ruthlessness about what deserves your irreplaceable attention and what doesn’t. It’s to treat your focused time as a protected resource — the same way you’d protect a critical capital allocation or a key relationship.
Because here’s the thing: the organizations that suffer when you burn out aren’t the ones you were too busy for. They’re the ones you never got around to thinking clearly about.
If you want to understand how the Focus Fallacy — and the other blind spots like it — might be showing up in your leadership, the Ten Blind Spots assessment at TenBlindSpots.com is a direct way in.
Busy isn’t a strategy. Clarity is.