The productivity paradox

Isn't it ironic that most of us start our entrepreneurial journey saying “yes” to everything that comes our way? We accumulate responsibilities like merit badges, wearing our exhaustion as a symbol of our commitment. Yet the entrepreneurs who create lasting impact all seem to land on the same counterintuitive truth: your greatest breakthroughs happen when you become ruthlessly selective about using your energy.

Alex Lieberman, co-founder of Morning Brew, calls this strategic selectivity “laziness,” but it's actually the opposite of what the word typically suggests. It's a disciplined approach that requires more confidence and clarity than constant motion ever will.

The first-time founder trap

When you launch your first business, you're rarely doing it alone. You have an invisible partner shadowing your every move—insecurity. This unwelcome (and frankly, pretty rude) co-founder whispers that you're not enough; you have to constantly prove your worth with constant activity and unlimited availability.

Honestly, it sucks. It traps you in a self-limiting belief that saying “yes” to everything will somehow accelerate your journey to success.

Lieberman describes this phenomenon using what he calls the “do shit meter,” a conceptual gauge of how much you're actively doing. For first-time founders, this meter is constantly maxed out.

Prospect wants you to hop on a sales call? “Done.”

Train a college ambassador? “You bet.”

Client thinks you should redesign the website over the weekend? “I'm on it.”

This hyperactivity feels productive in the moment. Each completed task delivers a small dopamine hit of accomplishment. Each “yes” seems to validate your identity as a founder.

But beneath this frenetic pace, there are hidden costs sinking you. You end up with:

• Diluted focus: Each new commitment fragments your attention, preventing the deep work necessary for breakthrough thinking.
• Accelerated burnout: Your mental and physical resources deplete faster than they can replenish, leading to diminishing returns on effort.
• Strategic blindness: When you're drowning in tasks, you can't rise above the water line to see the bigger picture.

I recently spoke with a founder who spent her first year saying yes to every podcast interview request, partnership opportunity and feature addition customers suggested. “I thought I was building momentum,” she told me. “But I was actually just spinning my wheels deeper into the mud.”

Being strategically selective or "lazy" is a disciplined approach that requires more confidence and clarity than constant motion ever will.

Your entrepreneurial fuel tank

Your entrepreneurial energy should be seen as a finite resource—a fuel tank you have to allocate strategically to reach your destination.

Not all activities consume the same amount of fuel. Low-impact tasks that misalign with your talents or vision burn through your reserves quickly, while moving you only inches forward. High-leverage activities that match your unique abilities and strategic priorities might require the same energy but propel you miles ahead.

This, my friend, is the critical distinction between “grinding” and applying “grit”:

• Grit means directing sustained energy toward meaningful challenges that align with your vision, even when difficult.
• Grinding, on the other hand, involves forcing yourself through endless low-value tasks, depleting your tank while generating minimal return.

Many entrepreneurs fall into the trap of seeking “inbox zero” in their business operations. They try to complete every possible task, respond to every request and capture every opportunity. But this pursuit is futile. There will always be more to do than can possibly be done.

Consider the contrasting examples of two SaaS founders I've spoken with:

• Founder A tried to personally handle customer support, product development, marketing, sales calls, accounting and team management. Within 18 months, they were experiencing chronic health issues, their product roadmap had stalled and team morale was plummeting.
• Founder B ruthlessly prioritized only the activities where their unique skills created disproportionate value—primarily product vision and key customer relationships. They aggressively automated, delegated or eliminated everything else. Three years in, their company was growing three times faster with half the operational complexity.

The difference wasn't work ethic—they were both ambitious. The difference was where and how they directed their limited energy.

Your greatest breakthroughs happen when you become ruthlessly selective about using your energy.

The confidence paradox

Here's where things get interesting: selective work‌ requires much more confidence than frenetic activity.

When you're constantly busy, you never have to confront whether you're working on the right things. Activity becomes a shield protecting you from the vulnerability of making consequential choices. But strategic selectivity forces you to trust your judgment in determining what truly matters.

This represents a crucial evolution in the entrepreneurial journey:

• Early stage: seeking external validation through visible activity and responsiveness
• Mature stage: trusting internal conviction about what deserves your time and attention

Learning to believe in your taste, abilities and vision isn't just nice-to-have—it’s the only way you’ll escape the slow-motion car crash that busywork invites.

The ability to say “no” to opportunities that don't align with your vision is directly proportional to your belief that you can identify and execute on the ones that will move the needle.

As Paige Cey, founder of Benny, puts it, “You know your business more deeply than anyone else. Even if you really respect someone and what they've built, their advice is just guidance. Not law.”

Creativity comes from strategic idleness

Perhaps the most counterintuitive aspect of the productivity paradox is how apparent idleness can become your secret creative weapon.

Eddie Schleyner, who writes the Very Good Copy newsletter, describes the creative process as having two essential phases:

• Knowledge acquisition
• Unexpected connections

The first part requires active learning and engagement. But the second—where the magic happens—rarely occurs while actively trying to force connections.

I mean, think about it. How often does sitting idly, staring at your screen, produce breakthrough ideas? Your brain needs space to work its associative magic in the background, linking concepts in novel ways, while conscious effort fails.

Neuroscience confirms this phenomenon. When you step away from focused work, your brain enters what scientists call the “default mode network”—a state where it continues processing information and making connections without your conscious direction. This is how your brain works when you're “not working.”

Activities that seem unproductive on the surface—taking a nap, playing a sport, listening to a podcast, heck, even staring out the window—can‌ be catalysts for your most valuable insights.

As artist and writer Austin Kleon observes, “You're often most creative when you're the least productive.”

The annals of entrepreneurship are filled with breakthroughs that emerged during moments of apparent idleness:

• Phil Knight conceptualized the core of Nike's business model during a morning run
• Sara Blakely dreamed up Spanx while getting ready for a party
• Slack evolved from a failed gaming company when the team stepped back to evaluate what tool they'd built for themselves

These moments of inspiration didn't arrive through grinding harder, but through creating space for the mind to make unexpected connections.

By being strategically “lazy”—refusing to fill every moment with visible activity—you create the mental space necessary for your most valuable creative work to happen.

The Mona Lisa effect

Lieberman offers a vivid metaphor for how we should think about our time. Imagine it as the Mona Lisa hanging in the Louvre.

When the Mona Lisa was first displayed, security was relatively lax. Anyone could get close to this priceless masterpiece. But as its value became more apparent, ‌protection systems evolved dramatically. Bulletproof glass, sophisticated alarms and trained guards.

Your time deserves the same evolution in protection. First, acknowledge its true value: irreplaceable and finite. Then dramatically increase the threshold for what deserves access.

To do this, you need to build better “security systems” around your most precious resource: your time.

Automate

Identify repeatable processes you can automate with technology. This might include email filters, template responses, scheduling tools or custom automations.

Delegate

Develop clear systems for transferring tasks to team members or service providers. The key is creating processes that don't require ‌ongoing management.

Eliminate

Regularly audit your commitments and ruthlessly eliminate those that don't directly contribute to your key objectives. Ask, “If this disappeared completely from my life, what would the actual impact be?”

One founder I’ve worked with has a brilliant filter. Any meeting request must explain what specific decision needs to be made that requires her presence. This single change reduced her meeting load by over 60% while improving the productivity of the meetings she does attend.

To increase productivity, get lazy

The path to greater impact often requires doing less, not more. It isn’t all you’ll need to succeed, but it is a necessary ingredient.

As you continue your entrepreneurial journey, embrace the productivity paradox. Resist the cultural pressure to maximize your “do shit meter” and instead, become ruthlessly selective about what registers on it at all.

Your most valuable contribution won't come from doing everything—it will emerge from doing the right things exceptionally well.