A man buys a bigger house to finally live comfortably. Within a year, his weekends disappear into maintenance — gutters, repairs, keeping the garden presentable, staying on top of a mortgage that demands more hours at work to service it. He tells people he’s doing well. He believes it himself, most days. But if you asked him to compare his life before the house to his life now, he has moved backwards on the very thing he bought the house for. He just can’t see it yet, because every individual week looks like effort, and effort feels like progress.
This is the trap. Not laziness, not failure — motion. Activity disguised as advancement.
Executives fall into the same trap constantly, and usually for the same reason: they’re measuring effort instead of position.
A status report goes out every fortnight. Tasks are closed. Milestones are marked complete. The steering committee nods along, because the document in front of them is full of green. Nobody in that room is lying. They are simply reporting motion and calling it progress, because nobody defined, at the start, what “closer to the goal” actually looks like compared to where they began.
A leadership team works longer hours than they ever have. More meetings, more decisions made, more fires put out before lunch. They feel busier and more essential than at any point in their careers. And yet, a year later, the thing they set out to build is no further along — sometimes further behind — because the hours went into defending positions and managing perception rather than closing the gap between where they were and where they said they were going.
A business invests heavily in a new system, a new structure, a new strategy — all in the name of getting somewhere better. Eighteen months in, everyone is working harder than before the investment. Nobody has stopped to ask whether “harder” has translated into “further.”
The reason this keeps happening is simple: most of us don’t have a baseline. We know how to measure effort — hours worked, tasks closed, money spent — because effort is easy to count. We’re far worse at measuring direction, because direction requires you to have written down, in advance, what you were actually trying to reach and where you were standing when you started.
Without that baseline, there’s no way to detect drift. You can only feel busy. You can only feel like you’re doing something. Whether that something is moving you forward, sideways, or quietly backwards is invisible until the gap becomes too large to ignore — and by then, the cost of correction has multiplied.
The uncomfortable part isn’t that this happens to other people. It’s that it’s happening to most of us right now, in some part of our lives, and we have no instrument capable of telling us so.
So the question worth sitting with isn’t whether you’re working hard. It’s: compared to where you started, do you actually know if you’re closer — or have you simply gotten better at looking busy while drifting away from it?
