The Truth About Those "Productive" Hours That Are Stealing Your Business Growth
By Claire Bartlett, Host of The Simplified CEO PodcastI'll never forget the morning I realised I'd spent three hours rearranging my project management system. Three entire hours. I felt incredibly productive. I'd been busy all morning. My fingers had barely left the keyboard.
And yet, I hadn't moved my business forward even one millimetre.
That was the day I discovered that being busy and being effective in business are not just different - they're often completely opposed to each other.
Here's what no one realises when you start a business: most of what fills your working hours isn't actually work. Not the kind that matters, anyway. It's just noise dressed up as productivity, making you feel important whilst quietly sabotaging everything you're trying to achieve.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Your Working Hours
We've built an entire culture around the worship of being busy. We wear our overflowing calendars like badges of honour. We apologise for not responding instantly, as though being perpetually available proves our dedication. We've confused motion with momentum, activity with achievement, and busyness with actual business growth.
And we're drowning in it.
We start businesses to create freedom, then trap ourselves in an endless cycle of tasks that feel urgent but ultimately don't matter.
The Three Types of Work (And Why You're Probably Spending 60% of Your Time on the Wrong One)
After building a six-figure business whilst working three days a week, then teaching other entrepreneurs to do the same, I've identified that all business activities fall into three distinct categories. Understanding these categories - and more importantly, understanding where you're actually spending your time - is the difference between a business that owns you and one that serves you.
Busy Work: Where ambition goes to die
Busy work is the dangerous one because it feels legitimate. It's all those tasks that seem important in the moment but don't actually move anything forward. Checking your email for the fourteenth time today. Perfecting that Instagram caption for twenty minutes. Reorganising your file system. Researching another course you might take. Creating systems you'll never actually use.
Busy work gives you the dopamine hit of feeling productive without the actual discomfort of doing anything that matters. It's safe. It's comfortable. And it's quietly destroying your potential.
The truly insidious thing about busy work is that it multiplies. The more you do, the more you create. Every new system requires maintenance. Every organisational structure needs updating. Every inbox eventually fills again.
It's like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic - meticulous, time-consuming labour that does nothing to address the actual problem.
Builder Work: The Treadmill of Legitimacy
Builder work is what keeps your business functioning. It's content creation, sales conversations, systems implementation, team management. These are the tasks that, if you stopped doing them, would cause immediate and noticeable problems.
This is legitimate work. Real work. Work that matters. And that's precisely why it's so dangerous.
Builder work can expand infinitely if you let it. You can spend sixty hours a week on builder work and convince yourself every single hour was essential. You can fill your entire schedule with tasks that matter whilst never creating space for what matters most.
Builder work is the treadmill that feels like progress. You're moving, you're sweating, you're working hard. But you're not actually going anywhere. You're maintaining, not transforming. Sustaining, not growing. You're so busy keeping the engine running that you never look up to question whether you're driving toward the right destination.
Breakthrough Work: Where Real Growth Happens
Breakthrough work is the deeply uncomfortable stuff that most entrepreneurs avoid like a root canal. It's creating that new offer you're nervous about launching. Having the sales conversation with a potential high-ticket client. Recording that video series even though you hate being on camera. Implementing the strategic pivot your business needs. Building the partnership that could double your reach.
Breakthrough work doesn't feel productive. It feels scary. It makes you question yourself. It requires you to be visible, to risk failure, to try something new. There are no guarantees here, no comfortable routines to hide behind, no metrics that let you pretend you're making progress when you're really just staying safe.
So we avoid it. We hide instead in the comfortable busyness of tasks that feel important but change nothing. We tell ourselves we'll do the scary thing once we're more prepared, more organised, more ready. We never are.
Here's what I've learned: you cannot build a thriving business without breakthrough work. You can hustle on builder work until you burn out. You can stay busy with busy work until you go mad. But without breakthrough work, you'll stay exactly where you are, working yourself to exhaustion for the same results you're getting now.
The Great Time Redistribution
Most entrepreneurs are spending 40-60% of their working hours on busy work, 35-50% on builder work, and maybe 5% on breakthrough work if they're lucky. This distribution is backwards. Catastrophically backwards.
To build the business - and life - you actually want, you need to flip this completely.
The entrepreneurs who are moving forward with purpose haven't discovered some magical productivity hack. They've simply understood something most people never will: that the vast majority of what we call "work" is actually just expensive therapy, a way to feel productive whilst avoiding the truly transformative actions that terrify us.
This isn't about time management. It's about reality management. It's about having the courage to admit that most of what fills your days is meaningless motion dressed up as meaningful work.
The mathematics of this are brutal in their simplicity. Five hours of breakthrough work will transform your business more than fifty hours of busy work. But we choose the fifty hours because they feel safer. Because they let us tell ourselves we're working hard. Because they don't require us to risk anything real.
We're living in an epidemic of performative productivity. We've convinced ourselves that being overwhelmed is the price of ambition, that exhaustion proves our dedication, that if we're not busy every moment we're somehow not serious about success.
It's all lies.
The truth is that most of what you do doesn't matter. Not in the way you think it does. You're hiding from the work that actually counts behind an endless mountain of work that simply doesn't - and perhaps you already know this, even if you're not quite ready to admit it yet. That thing you keep putting off, the project that makes your stomach flip, the conversation you're avoiding, the offer you're nervous to launch? That's your breakthrough work. And it's been waiting for you.
Those five to ten hours you claim you don't have? They're already there, hiding in plain sight within your week, disguised as necessary work. The question is whether you're brave enough to see them for what they really are, and redirect them toward what actually matters.
What if this isn't a time management problem at all? What if it's something far more fundamental, a question of courage, of willingness, of whether you're ready to stop performing productivity and start practising actual transformation?
You don't build an extraordinary business by doing ordinary things more efficiently. You build it by finally making space for the extraordinary - even when everything in you wants to retreat into the busy work that feels productive but changes nothing.
So, as we stand on the edge of 2026, there's a question worth sitting with: how will you spend your time next year? Will you stay busy, or is it time for your breakthrough…
