Busy Work vs. Result Work

You can run in place and become just as tired as someone running down the street.

But only one of you gets somewhere.

That is how I think about the difference between busy work and result work. Both can take time, require effort, and leave you exhausted. Both can make you feel that you are doing something important.

The question is whether your work creates results you can measure and learn from.

Do not measure the work only by how long you have tried

Students tell me they have been trying to build a business for a year, change careers for eighteen months, or get promoted for three years.

I want to know what trying means.

What did you do? What happened because of it? What did you learn? What did you change?

If you have been repeating the same action and receiving the same unwanted result, the length of time does not necessarily mean you have been progressing.

You may have been running in place.

That is frustrating and demoralizing. But it does not prove you lack the capacity to move forward. It tells you to look at the kind of work you are doing.

Ask what your strategy is supposed to produce

I coached a student who wanted ten one-on-one clients. She had been working on her practice for a year and had only a couple.

When I asked what she was doing, she said she posted content on social media every day.

I asked how quickly her audience was growing. It was barely changing. Engagement was not increasing either. She was getting roughly the same response to each post.

Daily posting felt like consistent effort, but it was not producing the growth her strategy required.

Organic social media can work as a strategy. It is not the approach I personally used to build my business, so it is not the one I teach. But if that is the strategy you choose, measure whether it is doing its job.

Are people interacting, sharing, and joining your audience? Is the content reaching the people you need to reach?

Liking your work does not replace measuring it

Sometimes students tell me they love their content and believe people need it.

That may be true. But if people are not paying attention enough to produce the result, something needs to change.

You cannot keep doing the same thing simply because it is familiar and expect it to create a different result.

For the student using social media, the next step was to identify a measurable audience-growth goal and test ways to reach it.

Then she could repeat what worked and change what did not.

The exact numbers would depend on her business. The important thing was connecting the strategy to an outcome instead of counting posts as progress.

Result work can produce a failure

Result work does not mean every action succeeds.

If you run down a road and discover it is a dead end, you have learned something. You can turn around and choose another road.

That is different from running in place, and it is different from returning to the same dead end over and over because you know it is familiar.

I want you to produce results you can identify as successful or unsuccessful. Both can be useful.

Different failures create information. They help you apply creativity and focus to the next experiment.

If something works, do more of it. If it does not, learn and adjust. You are either winning or learning.

Plan a result, not only an activity

In my time management work, I teach scheduling the result you will complete.

You do not only check off that you spent time working. You check off what that time produced.

That might be a finished piece of work, a completed offer, or another measurable outcome related to your goal.

Giving yourself a period of time to create something requires a different kind of focus from putting vague work time on the calendar.

It also gives you something to evaluate afterward. Did you create it? What happened? What needs to be different?

Repeat results you actually want

Doing the same thing each day is not automatically a problem.

You may have created a family routine you love. You make meals, spend time together, and repeat it. Those are beautiful, compounding results.

You found something that works and chose to continue.

I am talking to you if you do not want the results you are getting and want your life to change.

If an action creates the result you want, repeating it makes sense. If it keeps creating a result you do not want, repetition alone is not the answer.

List the different results you have created

Look at your big goal.

Instead of listing all the effort you have put into it, write down the different results you have produced.

If you posted a thousand times without a response, that is one repeated result. What else have you tried that created something different?

Keep passive learning separate in this exercise. Reading about an approach is not the same as applying it and seeing what happens.

You are looking for actual experiments.

If you feel stuck, you may find the list is short. If you have been trying, measuring, learning, and adjusting, you may have a long list of successes and failures.

Use what you learn to choose another direction

You cannot know every part of the how before you begin. You learn what works by testing.

That requires courage and a willingness to use your own creative mind.

If you discover a dead end, do not keep insisting that the same road should take you somewhere else. Turn around and test another direction.

Your lack of progress does not have to become evidence against your ability. Examine whether you are giving that ability a chance to create new information.

Stop counting only how tired you are or how long you have been at it. Create a result, measure it, learn from it, and use that knowledge to move.