The Busyness Trap

Being busy is seductive. We love to feel productive and that at the end of the day we did a lot of work. Unfortunately it is the impact of the work, not the amount of effort that went into it, that actually matters.

Building a team culture that resists the siren song of staying busy and instead focuses on the areas that truly matter is essential to success. That sounds easy, but finding product-market fit and doing the most impactful work is an art and science all to itself. 

To further add to the challenge, even if a team is doing the right work, if it is going about it the wrong way it may drive burnout, be unsustainable, or simply be too expensive. There is a balance to build a culture that can produce the right thing and do the work in the right way.

Defining the Busyness Trap

In many teams, especially as companies grow, activity is often mistaken for achievement. The “busyness trap” occurs when teams (and their leaders) focus on and reward effort, hours, and well-oiled process more than meaningful results. It’s easy to get swept up in the momentum of doing, without questioning if what’s being done actually matters.

Which Quadrant Is Your Team In?

• What are your goals?
  Are your goals set up to judge if the team is doing the right work? Ensure you are not focused on output but are instead focused on outcomes.

• What metrics are actually moving?
  Are your biggest achievements linked to business goals or customer value? If not, you’re drifting into the wrong work quadrants.

• What do you celebrate?
  If praise goes to late nights and beautiful slide decks, but not to outcomes, you may be stuck in the busyness trap.

• How’s your team morale?
  If people are exhausted, but proud of the results of their heroics, you might be doing the right work the wrong way. If morale is high but results are flat, you’re likely doing the wrong work the right way.

• Where’s the tension?
  Are PMs arguing over priorities, or are project managers lamenting constant firefighting or missed deadlines? These areas of friction indicate where you should look to improve.

The Cultural Costs of Busyness

At first glance, busyness can look like a healthy culture: everyone is in motion, no one is sitting idle, and there’s always something to show for the week. But the cultural effects of the busyness trap are often counterintuitive and quietly damaging.

Filling the Gaps Instead of Focusing on Impact
In many organizations, there’s a strong desire to ensure no one is “blocked” and idle time is seen as a waste. When a project hits a delay, team members are encouraged to find any available work, regardless of its importance. Over time, this leads to a culture where being busy becomes more important than working on the highest-value problems. People become skilled at “snacking” on side tasks or low-impact projects just to stay visibly productive.

The Illusion of Progress
When leaders equate busyness with progress, teams may optimize for activity instead of outcomes. The real danger: it becomes impossible to tell if you’re actually moving the business forward. The team’s output might increase, but its relevance to customers or the bottom line may steadily drop. This disconnect can persist for months (or longer) if leaders aren’t disciplined about tracking which metrics actually matter.

Hidden Lack of Focus
A culture that celebrates “always having something to do” subtly discourages hard conversations about prioritization. Instead of facing trade-offs or saying no to low-priority work, teams scatter their energy and dilute their impact. Over time, strategic focus erodes and morale drops as people see their efforts spread thin across too many initiatives.

Busyness as a Social Signal
In some teams, the appearance of busyness becomes a form of signaling: long hours, packed calendars, or constant status updates are seen as proof of commitment or worse. This culture can mask underlying problems, like unclear priorities or ineffective leadership, because everyone appears dedicated—while the company drifts away from what really matters.

The Outcome Problem
Ultimately, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. If teams are judged by how busy they are, rather than by the outcomes they deliver, it becomes nearly impossible to identify when the wrong work is being done, even if it’s executed perfectly.

Escaping the Trap: Finding the Right Work

1. Revisit what matters
Product managers and senior leaders must continually clarify what the “right work” is. This is not static and requires real goal setting and tracking to determine success.

2. Assign projects to outcomes
Before launching any initiative, ask: What metric will this move? How will we know if this is successful? 

3. Trim the busywork
Stop or shelve projects that aren’t advancing the strategy, no matter how well-executed. Encourage teams to challenge legacy work and understand why.

Escaping the Trap: Balancing the Right Way

1. Build sustainable systems
Project managers (or leads) should treat the process as a product that can and should be improved. It is their job to measure, analyze, and improve how work gets done without deflecting the team away from doing the right work.

2. Celebrate “how” as well as “what”
Recognize teams who hit results and do it with sustainable habits. Encourage a culture that does not rely on late night heroics but is also delivering results.

3. Listen to the teams
Teams often know the issues and challenges in their work, but may not know how to fix them. Listen to what is working and what is not working and put the focus on areas that everyone agrees could be improved.

Final Thoughts

True performance comes from balancing the right work and the right way. The cost of getting this wrong is real, it will kill your project, company, or team. 

A strong culture is built on clarity about what matters and ruthless honesty about where effort is truly making a difference. Leaders must do the hard work relentlessly avoiding busyness as a sense of accomplishment and build teams that resist the trap.