“Indiscriminate action is a form of laziness.” – Tim Ferriss
Last week in this space we talked about the importance of doing what matters, how you need to know WHERE you’re going so you know what to focus on, how you need to get those non-critical things off your plate.
I heard from a few people that while they agreed with the theory, the reality was that they’re too busy to spend much time thinking about WHERE their business is going. The business is doing well so they’ll just keep doing what they’re doing. If the business is profitable then they must be doing their job as leaders.
Wrong. Maybe that works for today, or this year. But at some point, your organization will need to change, not just to thrive, but to simply survive. Your customers will change, technology will change, competitors will change – there will be some significant disruption in your business. If you haven’t given any thought to WHERE your business is going, how will you possibly be prepared to deal with all those things?
The unfortunately reality is that too many leaders are so busy being busy that they’re failing in the most critical & valuable role they have: getting things ready for the future. Too many leaders have the same misconception that people everywhere have. They think that if they’re really busy, they must be providing lots of value to their business.
Some of that is a confidence thing. Nobody wants to believe that big chunks of how they spend their time aren’t valuable. We want to feel good about ourselves, so we convince ourselves that everything we do is a good use of our time.
Some of it is laziness. We don’t want to go through the effort to honestly evaluate ourselves and our performance. We don’t want to go through the effort of changing what our days & weeks & months look like. We just want to cruise along doing the same things we’ve been doing.
Whatever the case, don’t let yourself fall into the trap of equating effort with value. You are hurting the business and everyone who is part of it when you blindly grind along, working at meaningless tasks, when you could be doing things that help prepare your organization to succeed not just today, but one, two, or ten years from now.
Make a conscious decision to be valuable. Then figure out what that means, and do it. Don’t let being busy get in the way.
