Most People Are Busy as Hell and Broke
A simple framework to identify what's actually moving the needle and ruthlessly cut the rest
I spent four hours yesterday in meetings that could have been emails.
Another three answering Slack messages that didn’t matter.
One hour scrolling through my inbox, flagging things I’d deal with “later.”
By 6 PM, I was exhausted.
I’d worked a full day.
I’d also accomplished absolutely nothing that mattered.
You know this feeling.
That specific brand of burnout that comes from being constantly busy while your actual goals collect dust.
The targets you set at the start of the year.
The project that would actually move your career forward.
The side business that’s been “almost ready to launch” for six months.
We’re drowning in activity that feels like progress but produces nothing.
The problem isn’t that we’re lazy.
It’s that we’re optimizing the wrong shit.
We’re running full speed on a treadmill, congratulating ourselves for the effort while staying exactly where we started.
There’s a better way.
It requires one thing most people can’t stomach - the courage to look at how you actually spend your time and admit that most of it doesn’t matter.
The Default Setting Is Broken
Our natural instinct when we’re not hitting goals is to do more.
More hours.
More tasks.
More hustle.
It makes intuitive sense.
You’re not where you want to be, so clearly you need to work harder.
Add another hour to the workday.
Say yes to that extra project.
Respond to every message within five minutes to show you’re “responsive.”
This is how you end up working 60-hour weeks while your bank account stays flat and your actual priorities get pushed to “someday.”
The culture reinforces this.
We glorify busy.
We compete over who slept less, who has more meetings, who checked email at 2 AM.
Being swamped is a status symbol.
It signals importance.
But the reality is that most of what fills your calendar is theater.
You’re performing productivity for an audience that doesn’t exist.
I learned this the hard way.
For two years, I was the busiest person I knew.
My calendar was color-coded chaos.
I had systems for my systems.
I was “crushing it” according to every productivity metric except the one that actually matters.
Results.
My revenue was stagnant.
I hadn’t learned a new valuable skill in months.
The relationships that actually mattered - the ones that lead to opportunities - were deteriorating because I was always “too busy” to have real conversations.
I was confusing motion with progress.
Activity with achievement.
The data backs this up.
A 2014 study on productivity showed that students who used a Pareto-based system to prioritize their study material - focusing on the 20% of topics that would generate 80% of test results - significantly outperformed their peers who tried to study everything equally.
The students who did less, won.
In manufacturing, Joseph Juran applied this same principle to quality control.
He found that fixing the top 20% of defects eliminated 80% of errors and crashes.
Software developers now use this as standard practice - you don’t fix every bug, you fix the bugs that cause the most problems.
Your work life operates on the same principle.
A small portion of what you do creates the vast majority of your results.
The rest is just noise.
But we resist this truth because cutting things feels dangerous.
What if that random coffee meeting leads to something?
What if ignoring that Slack thread causes problems?
What if saying no makes people think you’re not a team player?
So we keep everything.
We stay busy.
And we stay stuck.
The Audit Nobody Wants To Do
Most people have no fucking clue how they actually spend their time.
They have a vague sense.
They know they’re in meetings.
They know they’re answering emails.
But if you asked them to break down last Tuesday, hour by hour, and explain what each block of time actually produced - they couldn’t do it.
This ignorance is expensive.
You can’t optimize what you don’t measure.
You can’t cut what you haven’t identified.
You can’t find leverage if you don’t know where it’s hiding.
So here’s what you do.
It’s uncomfortable, but it works.
Take last week.
Monday through Friday.
Brain dump every single thing you did that took more than 15 minutes.
Not what you wish you did.
Not what your calendar says you did.
What you actually did.
The meetings.
The emails.
The Slack conversations.
The “quick calls.”
The research rabbit holes.
The social media breaks that turned into 45 minutes.
The projects you worked on.
The calls you took.
All of it.
This list will be longer than you think.
Mine was 67 items when I first did this.
Sixty-seven separate activities in five days.
Now comes the hard part.
For each item, write down what it produced.
Not what it was supposed to produce.
What it actually produced.
Be specific.
Be honest.
Did that meeting generate revenue?
Did it build a relationship that matters?
Did it move a project forward in a measurable way?
Or did it just… happen?
Did answering those 30 emails create value?
Or did you just become the person who responds fast to shit that doesn’t matter?
Did that three-hour “strategy session” produce a strategy you’re actually implementing?
Or did it produce a deck that’s sitting in a folder somewhere?
This is where most people quit.
Because the answers are brutal.
You’ll find that a massive chunk of your week - probably 60% or more - produced nothing.
It didn’t make you money.
It didn’t make you better.
It didn’t strengthen important relationships.
It didn’t move your goals forward even a millimeter.
It just filled time.
In business, this pattern is everywhere.
Roughly 80% of revenue comes from 20% of customers.
In one ecommerce analysis, 80% of refunds came from a single issue - damaged products - while the other 80% of complaint categories generated almost no refunds.
When they focused on fixing that one 20% problem, refunds dropped dramatically.
Your time works the same way.
A tiny fraction of your activities generate almost all your results.
The rest is subsistence work.
Maintenance.
Noise.
But here’s where it gets interesting.
Finding The Few Things That Actually Matter
Once you have your list of activities and their actual outcomes, patterns emerge.
Three to five activities will stand out.
They’ll be the ones where you wrote down real, tangible results.
Revenue generated.
Skills developed.
Relationships built.
Problems solved.
Progress made.
These are your leverage points.
For me, when I did this exercise, the pattern was obvious and humbling.
Two activities produced almost everything valuable in my week.
Building products for AIAA and having deep conversations on coaching calls with students to identify bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement.
That’s it.
Two things.
Out of sixty-seven.
Everything else - the meetings, the email, the Slack, the “networking” calls with people I’d never work with, the organizational busywork - produced nothing.
Not a dollar.
Not a meaningful connection.
Not a single step toward any goal that mattered.
I was spending maybe six hours a week on the things that mattered and 34 hours on theater.
This is the moment where you have to decide if you’re serious.
Because once you see this clearly, you can’t unsee it.
Every time you open Slack or accept a meeting invite or volunteer for some committee, you’ll know you’re choosing noise over signal.
You’ll know you’re trading leverage for the comfort of being busy.
The question becomes - what are you going to do about it?
Most people do nothing.
They nod, agree this makes sense, then return to their default patterns.
It’s too uncomfortable to change.
Too risky to cut things.
Too awkward to say no.
So they stay busy and they stay broke.
The Part Where You Actually Cut Shit
Identifying leverage is easy.
Acting on it is where people fail.
Because cutting isn’t passive.
You can’t just “focus more” on the important stuff while keeping all the other stuff.
Your calendar is already full.
Your attention is already fragmented.
Your energy is already depleted.
To do more of what matters, you have to ruthlessly destroy what doesn’t.
Look at everything on your list that didn’t produce real outcomes.
Everything that exists only because “that’s how we’ve always done it” or “I should probably” or “what if.”
Start killing.
Eliminate first.
What can you simply stop doing?
No replacement, no delegation, just stop.
For me, this was most meetings.
I cut 70% of them.
The ones I kept were the ones that directly generated revenue or moved critical projects forward.
Everything else got canceled or converted to an email.
The world didn’t end.
Projects didn’t collapse.
In fact, things moved faster because we weren’t spending half our time talking about work instead of doing work.
Next, automate or systematize.
What takes up time not because it’s complex, but because you’re doing it manually like an animal?
I batched all communication to two windows per day - 10 AM and 4 PM.
Email, Slack, texts, all of it.
Outside those windows, everything was closed.
No notifications.
No “quick checks.”
I was terrified I’d miss something urgent.
In six months, there has been exactly one thing that couldn’t wait three hours.
One.
Out of thousands of messages.
The rest was just people being used to instant access.
Finally, delegate or delete.
If something has to be done but doesn’t require your specific skills or leverage, it shouldn’t be on your plate.
This is where most people fuck up.
They hoard tasks because they like feeling needed or they don’t trust anyone else or they’ve tied their identity to being the person who does everything.
But if you’re spending time on tasks that don’t use your leverage, you’re wasting the most valuable resource you have - the specific combination of skills and access and relationships that only you possess.
Every hour you spend on low-leverage work is an hour you’re not spending on high-leverage work.
It’s not neutral.
It’s expensive.
So you cut.
You automate.
You delegate.
You protect the 20% like your life depends on it.
Because it kind of does.
What Happens When You Actually Do This
Three months after I did this audit and actually acted on it, student satisfaction went up, we shipped more products, and I got more time back.
Not because I worked more.
Because I worked less - on the right things.
I was creating more content, which helped students and increased satisfaction.
I was having deeper conversations with fewer people, which led to better outcomes in those products.
I had space to think, which meant I could see opportunities I’d been too busy to notice.
The uncomfortable part?
I looked less busy.
My calendar had gaps.
I wasn’t responding to messages instantly.
To someone observing from the outside, it might have looked like I was doing less.
I was.
And I was producing more than I ever had.
This pattern holds across domains.
In software development, focusing on fixing the top 20% of bugs eliminates 80% of crashes.
In sales, focusing on the top 20% of clients generates 80% of revenue.
In skill development, mastering 20% of core competencies drives 80% of career results.
Doing less, better, wins.
But there’s a psychological barrier here that’s hard to overcome.
Being busy feels safe.
It feels like progress.
It gives you something to point to when someone asks what you’ve been up to.
It protects you from the vulnerability of betting everything on a few high-leverage activities and having them not work out.
Cutting things feels risky.
What if you miss something important?
What if people think you’re lazy?
What if the thing you cut turns out to have been valuable?
These fears are real, but they’re almost always wrong.
The cost of keeping low-leverage activities is certain - you’ll stay busy and produce mediocre results.
The cost of cutting them is uncertain - maybe you’ll miss something, but probably you won’t, and you’ll free up space for the things that actually matter.
One is guaranteed mediocrity.
The other is possible excellence with a small risk.
Choose.
Your Move
You already know if this applies to you.
If you’re working long hours but your goals aren’t moving, you’re optimizing the wrong things.
If you’re always busy but never making progress, you’re spending your life on the trivial many instead of the vital few.
Here’s what you do this week.
Block 30 minutes.
List your last ten work activities - the things that took real time and energy.
Star the two that actually mattered.
The two that moved something forward in a way you can point to and say “this produced value.”
Then ask yourself one question.
“What if I only did those?”
Not “what if I focused more on those while keeping everything else.”
What if you cut everything except the two things that actually matter and doubled down on them?
What would break?
Probably less than you think.
What would improve?
Probably everything that actually matters.
Leverage isn’t about doing more.
It’s about doing less of the right things and ruthlessly cutting everything else.
Most people won’t do this.
They’ll keep being busy.
They’ll keep confusing activity with achievement.
They’ll keep working hard on things that don’t matter and wondering why nothing changes.
You don’t have to be most people.
Find your 20%.
Cut the rest.
Watch what happens.