Everyone seems to share in our culture of "busy". In fact in the US we tend to wear and speak about our "busyness" with great pride. Listen for it, you hear people talking about how they've been traveling for weeks, taken no days off, are responding to 1,000 e-mails a day, and working into the wee hours of the night. We exchange the stories like we're soldiers bragging about tours of duty.

Busy doesn't impress me anymore.
I have noticed a very common theme; really busy people focus primarily on their activity level. The problem with this focus is that activity does not necessarily equal results and more importantly there is a very clear diminishing law of returns. We burn out. We get unconscious and robot-like. We get stupid. Yes, working really hard without breaks makes you stupid. I'm speaking from direct experience.

We are obsessively focused on activity, making the dangerous assumption that more activity equates to better results. Let's review the common activities we track today; hours worked, miles traveled, lines of code written, reports created, meetings attended, tasks completed, webinars given, hours billed, e-mails received/sent, calls made, tweets, likes, social connections, blog posts, you get the idea.

Activity does not equal results.

At the end of the month, quarter, year what do you track? Results, only results matter. Nobody goes to Wall Street and reports how many hours they worked or e-mails they sent. The Street doesn't care; in fact Wall Street actually wants to see you applying leverage to your business so results happen without so much human activity. The topic for your monthly review with your boss isn't about time served, it's about results delivered. We focus on activity right up until we have our most important conversations in business – then the only topic is results.

Lots of activity without results is the worst possible combination and I believe this is the number one indicator of leadership failure – you burn yourself and your people out while you fail to deliver.

To say that it's easy to get caught up in activity does not properly convey the tremendous amount of discipline it takes to stand up in the middle of this raging river of busyness and reflect on how your activities correlate to the results you want to create. Who has time for this? I have e-mails to respond to, meetings to attend, and reports to write!

I think a very large part of the resistance to focusing on results vs. activity is fear. Change has become our way of life and in particular in the print industry, nothing is going to be like it was in the past and the future isn't going to be like today. When we're afraid we look for ways to cope – maybe it's a glass of wine, a second dessert, or a cigarette. At work I think the newest form of coping is "activity" if we just stay busy everything will be OK right? Activity has a calming effect, you feel like you're accomplishing something and you're working hard so how could that be wrong? If we're busy we must be making money?

I am a consultant; my job is to ask uncomfortable questions. Many times when I do, I see the same look of fear in the faces of employees – if what I'm doing doesn't directly connect to results, what am I going to do? Will I have a job? I don't even know the results I'm supposed to be targeting.