1. The Hamster Wheel of Hustle: Redefining What It Means to Be “Busy”
I will be honest: this is a wheel I find myself on more than I would like to admit. I go about my day when things suddenly start picking up speed. Feeling overwhelmed and scattered in my thoughts and priorities, I end up back on that dreaded wheel. I frantically try to keep up with the hustle. Falling into busy trap leadership makes me unapproachable, simply because I feel like I am just too busy.
What does it actually mean to be busy? When are we simply filling our time with unnecessary work? If organised, prioritised, and sorted properly, many tasks could either be removed altogether or addressed in a calmer, more structured way.
2. The Significance Filter: How Leaders Prioritise Significance Over Speed
This is where the significance filter comes in. I have found that everything changes when I shift my focus away from an overwhelming workload. Instead, I look at which work will have a real impact.
Yes, you will sometimes have to deal with urgent tasks. However, practice and intentional pausing have taught me something crucial. These urgent tasks often are not as urgent as they seem. We rush to clear them quickly just to get them off our plate, but they frequently come right back a few weeks later.
If you take the impactful approach, you can address multiple urgent tasks all at once with a thoughtful, meaningful solution. Taken this way, urgent firefighting becomes a sustainable system with a better outcome overall that applies to similar tasks down the road.
A Practical Scenario: Onboarding Merchants
Let me put this into a practical scenario. My team and I were preparing to launch a new product. Our beta merchants were signed up and already engaging with it, but they all needed help onboarding, getting their accounts set up and their stores populated. We were jumping from one urgent call to the next, walking each merchant through the same steps, with a team member needed on every call. It was time-consuming and pulled us in every direction.
After a few stressful days, we stopped and asked where we could apply an impactful solution instead. Rather than repeating the same steps for each merchant individually, we recorded the process and put together a set of “how-to” onboarding videos. Merchants could watch and rewatch at their own pace, and share the videos with their team if they needed extra hands on their end.
It took a few days to record and edit, but it saved countless meetings and hours, and it resulted in a reusable walkthrough we still rely on for every new batch of merchants. It’s since evolved further into a full Support Page on our website, with the videos, an FAQ section, and a support form, turning what was once high-pressure urgency into something impactful, usable, and built to grow and last.
3. Building the Leverage Points: Setting Guardrails for High-Value Work
There are times when something is genuinely urgent and needs immediate attention. You do not always have the luxury of stepping back to assess, and sometimes you just need to act in the moment to resolve a critical issue.
But here is the key. Do not leave it there. Once you put out the immediate fire, take a moment to assess where you can improve the process. The next time something similar comes up, you will have a system mapped out and ready to go. This reduces the stress and scrambling caused by the initial issue.
Learn, apply, and repeat. You will not always get it right, and I certainly do not. However, as long as you keep refining the system and actively look for better ways to work, frenzy turns into function. Quality and value go up. Your team ends up working in a safer, more predictable environment where they know the steps to follow.
4. Slowing Down to Scale Up: Empowering Your Team to Own the Outcome
Building a sustainable solution usually takes more time upfront than applying a quick fix like hopping on another onboarding call. You need to assess the pattern. If a task is a genuine one-off, a quick fix is fine. If it is something that will come up repeatedly, stop and find a better way.
Help your team spot these repeat patterns early so you can apply a solution before losing hours to repeating the same pattern. Give your team room to own their outcomes. If someone finds a solution that works well for their workflow, encourage them to pursue it. Not everyone works the same way, so one solution will not necessarily fit all and thats ok.
Watch out for one trap: avoid having five different solutions for the exact same problem. If something needs to work across a team or the whole company, build a general framework while keeping the team involved in shaping it.
5. The Horizon Principle: Navigating the Future with Intentional Patience
Being a visionary can be lonely because you are always looking ahead, trying to predict what the horizon holds. To stop the hamster wheel from spinning, look at the next few steps rather than only the far-off future.
This approach helps you get off the wheel and start making real progress. Your long-term vision is a good thing to keep in sight, but focus on what you can do in the next few hours, days, or weeks to move immediate goals forward. Those smaller goals build toward the bigger outcome without burning you out along the way.
Take it one goal at a time. Achieve it, master it, then move to the next. Before long, you will find yourself standing on the horizon that once felt so far away.
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