TLDR: Are you busy or are you building? You need both, at different times, in order to thrive.
There are cycles of being in motion and cycles of making moves. While we need both cycles to be effective, we often get caught in those cycles for far too long.
What’s the difference?
Being in motion is being busy. Endless meetings. Keeping the inbox at zero. It feels productive in the myopic day-to-day sense, but it fails to capture the longer arc of potential when your time is better spent.
Making moves on the other hand is time spent thinking and executing, altering your course to a higher trajectory by rearchitecting the work itself and shipping a work product that actually makes it happen.
Personally, I tend to experience this in long sprints. A slower period that lends itself to thinking and shipping followed by a prolonged period of speed and execution against those ideas and tools—making moves followed by being in motion.
Paul Graham might refer to this as the maker’s schedule vs. manager’s schedule. And Naval might refer to it as being more like a lion.
I’ve not only noticed this pendulum swinging, but that it swings relative to the cycles of the business too.
In sales, that meant annual targets with quarterly moments to rethink and further optimize.
In venture, it cycles around fundraising and deploying, investing and supporting.
It’s important, whenever you realize you’re in motion instead of making moves, or vice versa, to track that energy closely and make adjustments.
Being in motion leads to burnout where making moves leads to inspiration.
Not oscillating between the two can leave you on the entirely wrong course, compounding and shipping the wrong types of work, so from time to time, it’s worth doing a calendar audit on yourself, and taking back control of whether you’re in motion or making moves.
See you Monday
PS: My first book, Inevitable, is now available on Amazon. Looking to do a good deed today? How about leaving a review…
About Inevitable. Founders nor career professionals have the time to read every book or listen to every podcast on operating with an entrepreneur's mindset. The goal with Inevitable was to create a powerful cliff notes style handbook, distilling advice from around the tech world on building generational companies. At the end of each chapter there is a QR code to a digital repository with the full-length works if you do choose to go deeper on any given topic.