📪 HH #79: From Busyness to Progress: Unlocking Your Potential
- Justin Hubbard
- May 1
- 6 min read
Updated: Jul 28
TL;DR – Most people stay “busy” all day but barely move their business forward. They’re stuck reacting instead of locking in. Answering emails, driving around, and tweaking little things may feel productive. However, it’s usually just disguised procrastination. Real growth comes from focused, uncomfortable, high-leverage work. This includes fixing broken systems, closing sales, training your team, or building better routes.
Your brain has been trained to chase distractions, not results. Studies show it takes less than a minute to lose focus and 30 minutes to regain it. You don’t need more time; you need better focus. Cut the noise. Eliminate distractions. Choose one needle-moving task each day and attack it with full attention.
Eliminate what doesn’t matter, delegate what you shouldn’t be doing, and automate everything else. In hauling—or any business—the person who blocks two hours for meaningful work will outpace the one running in circles. This shows at the end of year one, more in year two, and by year four, they become untouchable. Remember, motion isn’t progress—execution is. Focus is your superpower now.
The Importance of Focus in Business
If you’re like most people, you’re half-paying attention to almost everything you do. You answer a text while flipping through emails and half-listening to a podcast.
Then you wonder why, at the end of the day, you feel like you worked all day but didn’t actually make any progress.
We’ve trained ourselves to believe that being busy equates to being productive. In reality, busyness is often just procrastination dressed up to look important.
The Impact of Busyness
After a long day, when you assess what moved the needle—new leads, increased revenue, tighter systems, and stronger teams—you’ll likely realize that most of the “busy” work didn’t matter at all. It just distracted you enough to stave off feelings of guilt.
You may have been active, but you weren’t productive.
The Illusion That’s Killing Your Growth
Activity feels good because it tricks your brain into thinking you’re accomplishing something. You cross ten things off your list. You answer every email. You organize your workspace.
However, if these tasks did not directly help close a deal, improve operations, or develop your team, what was the point?
Being the busiest person in the room does not guarantee you will win the game. Real progress is often uncomfortable and unglamorous:
It’s calling an upset customer and salvaging the account.
It’s dedicating time to create a concrete marketing plan instead of wasting money on poorly thought-out boosted posts.
It’s having the tough conversation with your team about tardiness.
None of these tasks feel as “productive” in the moment as answering a barrage of emails, but they are the work that genuinely builds something of value.
Your Mind is Set Up to Fail Right Now
This distraction epidemic isn't entirely your fault. After all, everything around you is designed to pull your attention in countless directions at once.
Mobile devices, emails, and notifications have conditioned your brain to never sit still, even for a minute. Studies show that we can’t focus on one thing for more than 47 seconds before something pulls our attention away.
What happens when you get pulled off course?
It takes 20-30 minutes to regain your focus.
No wonder you feel like you’re working all day but not progressing anywhere. You aren’t broken; you’re just operating on an outdated playbook that rewards being “busy” rather than being thoroughly focused.
You Don’t Need More Hours — You Need More Focus
Many haulers, service professionals, and small business owners face a focus problem, not a time problem. You don’t need to work 18-hour days. What you need are two or three hours of distraction-free, focused work on tasks that genuinely matter.
Reflect on what you can actively improve:
Build a more efficient route system.
Fix the issues in your quoting process.
Train your team to properly upsell services.
Finally, close that deal you keep pushing aside.
If it isn’t moving the needle, it’s time to eliminate it, delegate it, or automate it. That strategy will help you concentrate on what truly grows your business. Everything else is just noise.
Focusing on high-leverage tasks with full attention—no social media, no phone calls, no “quick distractions”—will allow you to accomplish in two hours what most people stretch over two weeks.
The Hauling Life: A Case Study
In the hauling industry, I see many professionals “busy” all day: driving between job sites, checking yards, and immediately responding to customer calls, yet nothing really changes.
They remain stagnant.
Because remember, movement doesn’t equal progress.
Consider the owner who allocates two hours to focus on securing a significant real estate account or revamping crew routes to save on fuel costs.
That person will see the results—first by the end of year one, then by year two, and much more by year three. By year four? They’ll be in a league of their own.
This owner is zeroed in on high-leverage activities—those that facilitate growth and establish a superior business structure.
As an analogy: a truck can circle around and squander fuel all day long. But it’s the truck that hauls a full load efficiently from Point A to Point B that earns its keep.
The same principle applies to you.
How to Break Out of the Busyness Trap
Here’s how to shift gears and start making real progress:
Kill distractions — Silence your phone, close your email, and tell your office manager "no calls" for 90 minutes. Protect your focus like it’s your most valuable asset (because it is).
Pick your big win each day — Identify one key task that, if completed, would make your day a success. Focus on that, not on ten minor tasks.
Embrace discomfort intentionally — The work you avoid is often what you need to tackle first. Commit to it daily.
Measure results, not tasks — It’s not about how many boxes you can tick off; it’s about what gets better because of your efforts.
Reflect honestly — Each evening, ask yourself: Did I make significant progress today, or did I merely run in circles? Be tough on yourself and correct any mistakes the next day.
Focus is Your Superpower
In today’s world, there’s an overwhelming amount of noise. Everyone is rushing, reacting, and feeling stressed out.
If you can maintain focus, sit down, and work through one high-priority task at a time, there’s no doubt you will leave your competition in the dust.
The winners are not the busiest; they are the ones with the clearest vision and focus.
Become one of them. Transition from the thrill of busyness to the satisfaction of real progress. You may feel like you're moving slower at first, but trust me—you are actually moving smarter.
You are finally engaging in what really matters, and that’s the only thing that ever creates anything worthwhile. ✌️
Justin Hubbard
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