Differentiating good busy from bad busy can save your bottom line

Key Points:

• • Successful owners separate “good busy” — high-value tasks like vendor negotiations, training systems, and being the face of the brand — from “bad busy” operational work that can be delegated.
  • Protecting time for strategic priorities through intentional scheduling and delegation is what grows the business, while bad busy only keeps it treading water.

You know that old line about giving a task to a busy person if you want it done? I think about that all the time. The best employees I have ever had – especially the high schoolers – are never the kids with nothing to do after school. It’s the opposite. Those who are studying for AP geometry and leading the school council somehow show up 10 minutes early and never miss a shift. The kids with wide-open schedules are the ones calling in sick.

Busy people figure it out. They have to.

But then they grow up. I was that busy kid, were you?

As owners, we’re busy by default, because we own the place. Everything lands in our laps. I am not here to tell you to be less busy, but I am all for removing bad busy and owning only the good busy, because most of us spend way too much time on the wrong one.

Good busy is owner stuff. Real owner stuff. I do the vendor negotiations because that is a conversation where I can save real money, and nobody else has the context or the authority. I build the training systems because that is how I multiply myself. I show up to the chamber event and shake hands because I am the face of this thing. Those tasks require ownership. Not because we haven’t trained anyone else, but because they are fundamentally mine to do.

Bad busy is the rest of it. The Sam’s Club run because, well, I don’t want to pay someone to do that, is bad busy. Working the line every night, not because I’m a solid leader, but because I don’t trust anyone else to do it right. Doing next week’s schedule at 11 p.m. because the system is on my laptop and no one else’s. All of it feels like I am grinding, I am in it, I am not above the work. And that is true. But it is also true that any of those things could be someone else’s job if I had just taken the time to set it up that way.

The trap is this: What has to be done today will always beat what should be done eventually. The Sam’s run has to happen. The schedule has to get posted. That ticket will print, and someone needs to make it. But that vendor call that could save me $10,000 this year? That can wait. The SOP document that would let my manager do the schedule? I will get to it. Except I never get to it because I am always buried in the stuff that has to happen right now.

I lived that life – that lie – for a long ass time and it’s the trap of bad busy.

I have wasted entire years like this. Looking back and realizing I spent 12 months treading water instead of swimming anywhere. The only fix I have found is blocking off time for good busy, like if it is a doctor’s appointment. It goes on the calendar, and I do not move it for anything. Because if I do not protect it, the bad busy eats everything.

So, call yourself out, and do something: Delegate with AI, videos, training and trust because today is the day bad busy must die.

Being busy is not the problem. Being busy with the wrong stuff is.

MIKE BAUSCH is the owner of Andolini’s Pizzeria.