Not Needed for a While

What happens when the busyness stops

Every August I do the same thing. I step away from the frontline. Deliberately, and without apology.

Except that’s not quite true. There’s always a bit of apology in it. A small, stupid voice that says: what if they realise they don’t need you as much as you think?

That’s the bit nobody puts on LinkedIn.

I’ve built a lot of my life around being needed. Journalist, then recruiter, then founder, then coach, then whatever you’d call what I do now. Different jobs, same habit: be the one who’s across everything, be the one people come to, be busy in a way that looks and feels like importance.

So August is not a holiday. It’s a shift. A shift from working IN the business to working ON it. That’s the line I use when I’m explaining it to other people, because it sounds sensible and strategic and like something a serious business owner would say.

The truer version is: I stop being useful for three or four weeks and see what happens.

But nothing happens. And that’s the thing.

The inbox doesn’t collapse. My colleagues Maria and Ricky don’t need rescuing. The content continues. The whole apparatus I’ve convinced myself only turns because I’m turning it, turns anyway.

There’s a particular kind of still that comes with that discovery, and it isn’t restful, not at first anyway. It’s closer to being slightly bereaved. If it doesn’t need you every hour of every day, what exactly were all those hours for?

Somewhere around week two, that still turns into something else. Space.

I’ll be in the gym. On long walks. Bit of golf. Definitely at the beach, doing absolutely nothing that could be described as productive. And in among all that nothing, my brain - finally allowed to stop reacting - starts doing the thing it’s actually good at.

I’ll conjure a zillion ideas. Probably bin most of them. But the one or two that survive tend to be the ones that shape the next twelve months. They never arrive at the desk. They arrive on the bench press, the fourth mile, the ninth hole or beside the sea. Because you can’t create anything from inside a silo.

I don’t think the lesson here is “every business owner should do this,” even though I believe that. I think the lesson is smaller and less comfortable: the busyness was never proof of importance. It was just noise, and noise is easy to mistake for the sound of something working.

September, I’ll be back. Sharper. Ready.

But the useful bit already happened - the part where nobody needed me, and I was still fine. And so was the business.