The Excuse of "Too Busy"

Don't "busy" yourself out of business growth

I’ve often shared that I’m not a fan of the word “busy.” Frankly, I don’t know one person who doesn’t have a life filled with personal and professional activities that don’t keep them insanely busy. However, my real distaste for the word is because it’s used as an excuse as to why a business isn’t growing:

• Too busy to prospect for new clients

• Too busy to find time to build relationships with current clients

• Too busy to learn how new buyers want to be engaged

• Too busy to get educated on new technology platforms

• Too busy to shift your marketing approach to what your clients want, need, and expect

• Too busy to understand how to leverage social media to expand reach

These (and other) activities are crucial to the development and growth of a business – how can anyone be so busy that they are prevented from engaging in them?

The answer is they aren’t. Busy has become a convenient excuse not to do things that are uncomfortable or that seem challenging to understand, tackle, and implement. The cry of “too busy” is an easy way to rationalize away things we don’t want to do, and precious few will challenge it.

Today, I’m challenging you on it.

Next time you start telling yourself that you’re too busy to do something to help grow your business, take a moment and examine the situation closely: are you really too busy to engage in the activity, or are you merely avoiding it? The answer is almost always the latter.

When you allow being “too busy” to stop you from doing activities that will lead to business growth, those activities aren’t important to you. Conversely, when business growth becomes essential to you, there isn’t a schedule so busy that it will stop you from engaging in the activities necessary to accomplish it.