Hey Friends! This will be my last post of 2025 - I'm taking the next two weeks off to enjoy the holidays with family and friends. Thanks for adventuring with me this year; I'm looking forward to picking up after a refreshing break!
I arrived at my weekly 1:1.
"How's your workload, Blink? Are you staying busy?"
Of course I was. Our team's sprint backlog was full, yesterday was the start of the new sprint so there was a lot of stuff on the board. What kind of a question was that?
Digging into the Reaction
The thing about “busy” is that it doesn’t actually tell you anything. I could spend an entire day chasing Slack pings, jumping into meetings, or tinkering with half-finished tickets and still say with a straight face, “Yes, I’m busy.”
And yet, none of that would mean we had delivered any value.
That’s the trap: busyness isn't productivity. When a leader asks if you're busy, there's a subtle connotation that rides along with that question, and it leads to a place where teams optimize for the wrong things. We stack our sprints with filler tasks just to look full. We over-document status updates so no one thinks we’re idle. We guard our calendars like trophies: proof that we must be important, because look at how little white space we have left.
But outcomes don’t care how crowded the calendar looks. Customers don’t care how many Jira tickets we closed if nothing meaningful changed for them. “Busy” becomes a shield against harder questions: are we actually making a difference?
Reframe: Better Questions Than “Busy”
Imagine if instead of “Are you busy?” my manager had asked:
- What value did we deliver this week?
- Where are the biggest blockers slowing us down?
- What’s the next most important thing to move forward?
Those questions shift the conversation from activity to effectiveness. They uncover what’s working, what’s stuck, and where leadership can actually help.
Healthy teams don’t measure their worth by how many hours they logged or how full their sprint board looks. They measure it by outcomes: Did we make the product better? Did we reduce pain for customers? Did we create space for future work to move faster?
Leaders who stop asking about busyness and start asking about progress send a powerful signal: what matters isn’t how much you look like you’re doing, it’s whether you’re moving the needle.
Practical Advice: Shifting the Conversation
It's important to note that my manager isn't the only one with room for improvement in our conversation. I should have responded differently - I could have helped us both in that moment but I didn't have the awareness until later on. Let's look at how we both could have changed the interaction to something more valuable.
For leaders and managers
Stop checking for “busy.” Instead, ask questions that reveal outcomes and health. Try: “What did we move forward last week?” or “Where do you need support to unblock progress?”
Listen for signals, not noise. A quiet calendar or half-empty sprint board isn’t a red flag—it might mean the team is focused and working effectively.
Model outcome-first thinking. Celebrate customer impact, reduced friction, or lessons learned, not just task completion.
For engineers and ICs
Redirect when you're asked about busyness. If someone asks, “Are you staying busy?” respond with impact: “Yes—we shipped the onboarding fix, and it cut setup time by 30%.” A gentle nudge, repeated over time, will train the conversation to take a different direction.
Highlight outcomes, not optics. Bring up blockers, progress, and learning. This keeps the focus on what matters rather than how full your plate looks.
Protect meaningful work. Don’t fill your day with shallow tasks to look active. Guard time for deep, value-driving work.
Wrapping Up
It's deceptively simplistic, but what we ask about betrays our thoughts. We're going to ask about what matters to us!
I believe that we can change the "cause" by altering the "effect", though: altering the way we ask our questions guides us to a different train of thought where we can learn to focus on value rather than appearance.
Take a moment and review your conversation from your last 1:1. What were you really focused on?
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