Founder Insight: Being Busy Is a Terrible KPI

One of the unexpected things about becoming a founder is discovering that, despite leaving employment behind you, you can still acquire a terrible boss.

Unfortunately, it’s you.

Mine turned out to be quite demanding. She expected me to be at my desk constantly and, frankly, had absolutely no respect for my work-life balance.

For years, I assumed a productive day was a busy day, whereas now I’m starting to think that the opposite may be closer to the truth.

The aim isn’t to do less simply for the sake of doing less. However, I remain very open to any business strategy involving a nap; I'm just trying to stop using the volume of activity as proof that the business is actually moving forward.

Becoming a founder, particularly after spending years in the corporate world, is a much stranger transition than I expected because working for other people trains us to associate being visibly occupied with being valuable.

You arrive at the office. You sit at your desk. Your diary is full. Emails are flying around. You are on calls. You have opened Excel for reasons nobody fully understands.

Excellent. Work is happening.

Technically, you could also be terrible at managing your time, spend three hours doing something that should have taken forty minutes, rewrite the same presentation seven times because FINAL_v4_ACTUALFINAL still wasn't quite final, then spend another hour emailing everybody about it.

You would be extremely busy.

None of that necessarily means you are extremely good at your job.

Yet when you are employed, an underlying structure reinforces the idea. You are largely paid to be there from 9 til 5, or from when you start until you're allowed to escape.

I can remember countless occasions when I had finished everything I genuinely needed to deliver that day. Yet, it wasn't technically “home time”, so I sat at my desk faffing about for another twenty, thirty or forty minutes until it felt socially acceptable to leave.

What an absolutely enormous waste of a human life.

The slightly ridiculous part is that when I became a founder, with complete control over my own time, I promptly recreated the whole thing.

No manager or office. No contracted hours, yet still somehow chained to a laptop.

When you first set up a business, the need to be busy feels incredibly powerful because busy feels safe.

You should be at your computer, checking LinkedIn, and sending emails. You should probably tweak your website again even though nobody asked you to and perhaps change that sentence back to the version you had three days ago.

Busy gives you something tangible to measure, and a long to-do list gives you lovely little boxes to tick, which in turn gives your brain a tiny reward and convinces you that progress has occurred.

For the first eight months of founder life, I was almost permanently attached to my desk, constantly tweaking, planning, writing, responding and finding another thing that apparently needed doing immediately.

The funny thing is that without colleagues around you, it is incredibly easy to forget how much genuinely valuable work never looked particularly like “work” in the first place.

The thinking, talking, sharing ideas, or even just having a conversation that unexpectedly gives you the answer to something you have been wrestling with for weeks.

Those things happened constantly when I worked inside businesses. Yet, when I started working for myself, for some reason I decided value could only be created if my face was approximately twelve inches from a screen.

So now I’m trying to judge my days differently.

Rather than asking, “How much did I get done?”, I’m asking, “Did I create an opportunity?” “Did I move that project forward?” or “Did I help that client achieve something that matters?”

The answers to those questions are proving far more useful than whether I managed to cross fourteen things off a list.

If you’ve read any of my other Founder Insights, you’ll know that one of the reasons I created my business was to build work around my life. Yet, for the first eight months I managed to recreate many of the habits I had deliberately walked away from, only this time there wasn't even anybody else making me do them.

September and the peculiar psychological fresh-start effect of “back to school” has made me reconsider how I want this next stage of StoryOne to work, particularly whether I genuinely need to squeeze everything into today, or whether doing something meaningful every day is enough.

I’m creating fewer tasks and asking myself better questions.

I’m judging my progress less by how many boxes have been ticked and more by whether the things that actually matter have moved.

I’m also trying to accept that going for lunch, exercising, seeing somebody, picking my children up from school or simply closing the laptop because the important work is finished does not mean I am somehow shirking my responsibilities as the boss.

Especially given that the boss is also the person telling me to take the afternoon off.

I’m sure at some point I’ll stop feeling guilty about enjoying the time with my children that I specifically created this business for. The irony that I felt so guilty about being away from them when somebody else employed me is certainly not lost on me.

So my new founder KPI is considerably less impressive than a long to-do list of ticks.

Did I do something valuable today?

If the answer is yes, I’m sure my boss will cope, and she’s already learning that success comes from delivering value in the hours I choose to work, not recreating the hours of my old working day.