Show Me the Busy

“Busy” is one of the most common answers you hear when you ask teams how things are going.

Teams are busy. In fact, many teams are too busy.

But here’s the real problem: they’re not always busy doing the right things.

Over the summer, while working with clients, I started thinking about how to address this pattern. Again and again, the issue wasn’t effort or capability. It was where time and attention were actually going. That led me to a simple way of categorising work into three types:

The three types of work

Reactive work

Firefighting, emails, last-minute asks, Teams and Slack messages, distractions.

Proactive work

The high-value to-do list.

Planned work

The structured, predictable work that moves objectives forward.

The problem is not that reactive work exists. The problem is that it can expand to dominate everything.

Without clear edges around it, reactive work can swallow your capacity for proactive work and destroy even the best laid plans.

When reactive work takes over

I’ve seen brilliant managers fall into the same trap. Their diaries fill with calls, meetings, and small fires. Lunch breaks disappear. Strategies get written at 8pm instead of 2pm. Personal events are missed. All the while, careers stagnate.

What makes this particularly tricky is that reactive work often feels productive. It’s fast, urgent, and comes with instant feedback. The cortisol and dopamine rollercoaster of solving a live problem is real.

Over time, however, this way of working quietly eats away at a team’s ability to think strategically, build capabilities, and deliver meaningful outcomes. Setting clear boundaries, improving transparency around what people are working on, and building structure around diary time and capacity is not a “nice to have”. It is critical for success.

Making the work visible

To help teams tackle this, I’ve started running a workshop with clients called “Show Me the Busy” (yes, a Jerry Maguire reference).

The workshop focuses on making work visible. By mapping where time actually goes across reactive, proactive, and planned work, patterns emerge very quickly. Conversations change. Trade-offs become explicit.

I recently described this approach at an invite-only CIO conference. The session was recorded and is available to watch below:

▶️ Watch the session:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1POHUDbl6A

A question worth asking

Once you understand the three types of work, you can start treating them appropriately and reclaim capacity in your diary for the work that really matters.

A useful starting question is a simple one:

Which type of work dominates your week right now?

Reactive, Proactive, or Planned?

And what would need to change for that balance to shift?