Busy isn’t the same as progress
If someone looked at your calendar for the last four weeks, what would they conclude matters most to your business?
It’s rare to find a founder who isn’t busy. Most are working long hours, and are highly motivated to do so. The challenges they talk about aren’t around lack of energy or ideas – they’re about deciding what deserves attention.
Growing businesses are like greedy little monsters: they gobble up time, and then demand more. Activity is the currency. You can spend all your hours getting through things… ticking off dozens of tasks, spinning plates, meeting people… It feels productive, but you can get to the end of each week with the sense of not having made any strategic progress.
To make things worse, our cultural tendency is to think ‘more is better’. We don’t often enough congratulate ourselves on stopping, thinking, and deciding not to do something. This is particularly evident in people with the drive and ambition to become founders and leaders.
What’s really stopping strategic decision-making?
The work that matters most is often the easiest to postpone. Strategic thinking rarely has an end-of-day deadline. It’s hard. It needs space, time, the ability to step away from the urgently flashing-dashboard effect of your inbox and Teams chat.
But when founders say they don’t have time to think strategically, I wonder whether there’s also something deeper going on. Something that isn’t just time-based.
Those big questions feel uncomfortable. They prod at things that are difficult to answer, or that force you outside of your comfort zone. Where are we trying to get to? What’s actually working? And what isn’t? What do we do about it?
These questions are difficult precisely because they matter.
Small tasks give us that dopamine hit, the satisfaction of completion. Strategic work doesn’t have that instant reward. Behaviourally, it makes complete sense that we occupy ourselves with the task-based to-do list.
So how do we make space - often enough - for strategic thinking?
Three small interventions
Drawing on behavioural science, here are three tactics that work particularly well for nudging your own behaviour!...
1. Create a deadline
To address the barrier of something else always feeling more urgent, create a deadline. Put a meeting in the diary that requires you to arrive having done the thinking beforehand. Whether it's with your leadership team, co-founder or an advisor, creating an external imperative makes strategic thinking harder to postpone.
2. Create accountability
We're less likely to break promises to other people than to ourselves. We can use that tendency positively, by working with others to build accountability for the things we have said we’ll do (and want to do!). Open up the conversation with someone you trust and give them permission to ask the difficult questions. What have you decided to stop doing? What are you avoiding? What's changed since we last spoke? Accountability isn't about being judged; it's about creating a commitment to keep returning to the things that matter.
3. Create an ongoing pattern
Strategic thinking isn't an annual off-site or a one-off exercise. The most useful decisions are revisited regularly, refined and adjusted, and sometimes completely changed as you learn. Put regular review points in the diary, perhaps once a quarter, and treat them as firm commitments. This turns good strategic thinking into an ongoing, embedded pattern in how you work, and in itself makes it easier to keep the momentum.
To talk through how this can work for your needs, drop me a line.
