You’ve gotta want it, Timmy

When being busy stops business growth

Sometimes the workload is genuinely too much. But there is another point where busy tips into something else.

We get caught like a deer in the headlights. There is so much to do, so much that needs fixing and so many competing priorities that we become unable to do anything except deal with whatever lands directly in front of us. We answer the email, attend the meeting, fix the immediate problem and push the important decision back another week.

When you have been operating under stress for long enough, even deciding what to do next can feel impossible. Everything looks urgent, nothing feels clear and, although you are constantly moving, you are no longer choosing where you are going.

That is when busyness starts taking away your sense of agency. You stop running the business and begin reacting to it.

You’ve gotta want it, Timmy

A good friend of mine, Fitzy, once yelled across a touch football field after a teammate missed a touch: “You’ve gotta want it, Timmy!”

Brutal. Simple. And surprisingly useful advice for life and business.

Not because the answer is to work harder. Most business owners do not need to be told to put in more effort. That horse has been flogged, buried and turned into a motivational LinkedIn post.

“You’ve gotta want it” means something different. You have to want the better outcome enough to interrupt the pattern. Enough to take the meeting you have been avoiding, cancel the meeting that exists only because it has always existed, stop offering the service that keeps everyone busy but barely makes money, or hand over the task someone else should already own.

You have to want the outcome enough to make one difficult decision before you feel completely ready.

Sometimes it is genuinely difficult to see the wood for the trees. Other times, if we are honest, we know exactly what needs to happen. We simply do not want the discomfort that comes with doing it.

Too busy running today’s business

For business owners, constant busyness has another cost: it leaves no space for something new.

You become so busy delivering the current service, solving the current problem and keeping the current customers happy that you never stop to ask whether the business itself needs to change. What are customers asking for now? What is becoming harder to sell? Which part of the business creates plenty of activity but little profit? What could be automated, simplified or handed over? What could become a repeatable product instead of another completely customised job?

And perhaps most importantly: what has changed around you while you have been busy looking down?

These are not fluffy strategy questions. They are survival questions.

Customers change, technology changes, competitors change and costs rise. What worked brilliantly three years ago may now be the very thing keeping the business stuck.

The dangerous part is that a business can remain extremely busy while slowly becoming less relevant. Everyone is working hard, customers are still calling and jobs are still going out the door. But margins may be shrinking, the team may be exhausted and the owner may still be involved in everything. New ideas remain ideas because nobody has the time or headspace to test them.

Busy can look a lot like success from the outside. Sometimes it is simply a business consuming all its energy to stand still.

How to make space for new ideas

Useful new ideas do not usually arrive while you are racing between tasks. They need enough space for you to notice what is changing.

That does not mean disappearing into a six-month strategy process involving butcher’s paper, beanbags and seventeen shades of sticky note. It might mean taking a meeting with someone who sees the business differently, asking the team what they would stop doing if they were allowed to, or testing a smaller version of a new service before every detail is perfect.

It may mean looking honestly at where the time goes, rather than where everyone assumes it goes. It may simply mean protecting one hour to think about what the business needs next instead of filling that hour with more of what it already does.

The point is not to create endless thinking time. It is to create enough thinking space to make better choices.

More speed, less haste

Speed and haste are not the same thing.

Speed comes from clarity. People know what matters, who owns it and what happens next. The path is clear, the process works and the decisions that can be made in advance have already been made.

Haste is rushing into more activity without fixing the confusion around it. It creates more emails, more meetings, more rework and more tasks that need checking by three people because nobody is quite sure who owns the result.

Haste feels fast in the moment. Across the whole business, it is often painfully slow.

The businesses that move quickly are not always the ones where everyone works faster. They are usually the ones that have removed more friction. They have stopped unnecessary work, built repeatable processes, made ownership clear, given people the authority to act and stopped reinventing the wheel every Tuesday.

Start with one deliberate decision

You do not need to fix everything at once. When you are already overwhelmed, that is just another impossible job to add to the list.

Instead, choose one deliberate interruption. Take the meeting. Stop the task. Hand over the work. Say no to the request. Protect the hour. Test the idea. Make the decision that gives the business a little more room to move and then make another one.

Want more time? Stop something. Want the team to take ownership? Let go of something. Want the business to change? Make space to change it. Want less chaos? Stop treating every request as equally important. 

And if you want something new, stop expecting it to emerge from the scraps of time left after everything else is done.

You do not need the whole plan before you start. Action often creates clarity far more reliably than waiting for clarity to arrive.

Build the business you need next

The work of today will happily consume every hour you give it. There will always be another customer request, another deadline, another email and another small fire that appears more urgent than thinking about the future.

No one is going to arrive and hand you a quiet week for innovation. You have to claim the space.

Being busy may keep the current business operating, but it will not necessarily build the business you need next.

A small disclaimer: I was too busy to write this blog.

There were plenty of other things that felt more urgent, and it would have been very easy to push it to next week. But I made myself a promise that I would publish something on LinkedIn every week.

Not because another LinkedIn blog will bring civilisation back from the brink, but because making space to think, write and share ideas matters to me and to the business.

Sometimes you don’t find the time. You make it.

You’ve gotta want it, Timmy.