Busy is the New Stupid

How perpetual urgency is sabotaging your most important work.

"Busy is the new stupid." I don't know who said it first (some attribute it to Warren Buffett, others to Bill Gates), but whoever coined it nailed something essential about our current moment.

At Nerd/Noir, we're seeing a troubling pattern. Leaders hire us to help with critical initiatives (product transformations, developer experience improvements, organizational design), then struggle to find time to engage with the work they've commissioned. We're not just competing with other consultancies for mindshare. We're competing with the “tyranny of the urgent” for basic attention.

This isn't a humble brag about our calendar-booking prowess. It's a warning sign about how "busy" has become the archenemy of progress.

The Attention Economy War

We're living in an attention economy where everyone is fighting for the same scarce resource: your focus.

Your phone buzzes with notifications designed by teams of behavioral psychologists. Your calendar fills with meetings that could have been handled via email. Your Slack threads multiply like digital weeds, each demanding immediate response.

This isn't an accident. It's by design. Every app, every platform, every business partner is optimizing for engagement, for mindshare, for that precious slice of your sweet, sweet cognitive bandwidth.

And the result? We're all drowning in a sea of artificial urgency, mistaking the volume of inputs for the quality of outputs.

The Busy Trap

Here's what we're witnessing: senior leaders champion an initiative, allocate a budget, kick off the work, and then promptly disappear into a vortex of meetings, firefighting, and reactive work. Three months later, they surface, wondering why the change isn't happening faster.

Sound familiar? From which side?

The problem isn't that these leaders don't care. They're drowning in a culture that mistakes motion for progress, confusing being busy with being productive. Every slot on the calendar feels urgent. Every Slack notification demands immediate attention. Every fire needs to be extinguished personally.

But busy isn't a strategy. Quite the opposite, it's an abdication of strategic thinking.

The Hidden Costs of Perpetual Motion

When leaders are too busy to engage with their own strategic initiatives, several things happen:

First, the work loses its champion. Without ongoing leadership visibility and decision-making, teams diverge, operating on outdated assumptions. Progress slows. Momentum dies.

Second, you send a signal to your organization about what actually matters. If the sponsor can't make time for strategic work, why should anyone else? Your teams start treating the initiative like just another thing on the pile rather than a priority that could transform their work.

Third, you miss the iterative refinement that makes change stick. Strategy isn't something you set and forget. It's something you adapt based on learning. But adaptation requires attention, and attention demands time.

Working Within Reality: Concentrated Collaboration

Recognizing this attention crisis, we've had to rethink how we design our engagements at Nerd/Noir. We've stopped pretending that people have unlimited time for synchronous collaboration. In 2025, I’d go so far as to classify that notion as a Pollyannaish fantasy. It ain’t gonna happen.

Instead, we've redesigned our workshops around a simple principle: attention is precious, so let's make the most of it when we have it.

We've dramatically reduced the number of hours that depend on everyone being in the same room (physical or virtual) at the same time. Instead, we've created rich resources that allow people to engage with the content on their schedule. Pre-work materials, guided exercises, and even AI-powered thought partners that help people work through the concepts before we come together.

When we do gather synchronously, we're not starting from zero. People arrive prepared, having already grappled with the content. Our collaboration time becomes focused on synthesis, decision-making, and resolving tensions, rather than simply transferring basic information.

Busy isn't a strategy. It's an abdication of strategic thinking.

Let's face facts. These days, people are likely to engage with an LLM anyway to help them process complex concepts. Rather than fight this reality, we're embracing it. We create resources designed to work well with AI assistance, helping busy leaders get up to speed quickly.

The result? Our synchronous time becomes incredibly productive because we're not competing with the urgent—we're making space for the important work that only happens when smart people think together.

The Paradox of Strategic Leadership

Back to you, leaders.

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: the more senior you become, the more your job is about choosing what not to do. Your calendar will expand to fill every available moment unless you actively resist.

I recently facilitated a strategy session where I observed a senior leader multitasking throughout the entire call. This happens all the time. Eyes darting between screens, typing responses to Slack messages, answering emails, and clutching smartphones… do you realize we can see you? All of this was happening while we were discussing a multi-million dollar transformation initiative. When asked for input, there'd be a pause, followed by "Sorry, can you repeat that?"

This leader probably thought they were being efficient by staying on top of multiple urgent matters while participating in our discussion. But how much situational awareness can you gain when your attention is on spinning five or six different plates? The quality of their understanding, their ability to synthesize information, their capacity to make informed decisions?! These are all compromised by the illusion of multitasking productivity.

I remember working with a CPO who constantly complained about not having enough time for strategic work. When we asked about her calendar, we discovered she was attending every product demo, every retrospective, and every planning session across her organization. She was drowning in the tactical while her strategic responsibilities went unmet. Throwing strategy into the multi-tasking hopper is a bad, bad idea.

The fix wasn't time management. It was about learning to delegate, trusting her team, and protecting time for the thinking work or being present for the deep collaborations that only she could do.

Breaking the Busy Cycle

So, how do you escape the busy trap?

Start with the diagnosis. Track your time spent for a week. Not how you think you spend it, but how you actually spend it. The data might surprise you. How much time goes to genuine strategic work versus reactive busywork?

Design enabling constraints. Block time for strategic work and treat it like any other important meeting. Turn off notifications. Close your email. Create the conditions for deep work to happen.

Practice strategic delegation. Ask yourself: "Am I the only person who can do this, or am I the only person who currently knows how?" If it's the latter, teach someone else. These delegation motions also help you build trust within your team and assess their performance and engagement.

Measure outcomes, not activities. The tricky bit about switching to an outcome-first model is that time utilization ceases to be a valuable metric. Make your experiments efficient, but they must be effective first. Stop celebrating how many meetings you attended or emails you answered. Start measuring progress on the things that matter: initiatives that will define your organization's future impact.

Learn to say, “No.” This is the hardest tactic for most leaders people to master. Every request feels important when it lands on your desk. But saying yes to everything is saying no to your strategic priorities. Practice these responses: "I can't take this on right now, but let me suggest someone who can." Or: "This sounds important. Help me understand how it relates to our Q1 priorities." Or simply: "I'm going to pass on this one." The key is to offer alternatives when possible and be direct when not.

Embrace Strategic Boredom

As a leader myself, I prioritize creating unstructured time in my schedule for deep thinking, observation, and connecting ideas. Experience has shown me that my most valuable contributions often come from "doing nothing" (or at least that’s what it must look like to others). Quiet moments of strategic reflection can lead to breakthrough insights and better decisions.

This isn't about working less. It's about working on the right things. The urgent will always be with us, but as for the important? The critical stuff requires protection. Guard it jealously.

If you're too busy to engage with your strategic initiatives, you're not being productive. You're being reactive. And in a world that rewards thoughtful action over frantic motion, that's not just inefficient, it's stupid.

What signal are you sending?

Take a hard look at your calendar this week. What signal are you sending about what matters to you? Are you creating space for the work that will define your organization's future, or are you drowning in the urgent at the expense of the important?

The choice is yours. Being busy isn't a badge of honor. It's often a sign that you're not in control of your priorities (the one thing you ought to be able to control). Remember: your people can see that, and you set the tone for that culture.

So ask yourself: what kind of leadership behaviors do I want to model? Stupidly busy or intelligently engaged?