Why Saying 'I'm Too Busy' is Killing Your Agency and 6 Ways to Fix It

Hey, everybody, and welcome to this week's Agency Accelerator Podcast. I'm your host, Rob DaCosta, and I'm thrilled you've joined me for today's episode. Now, whether you're a longtime listener or maybe this is the first time you're tuning in, I am so thankful that you're here. Today. We're diving into a topic that is really close to my heart and I believe crucial for every agency owner and team member out there. It's a topic that I've been meaning to record an episode on for ages, and I've got around to it at last. So today we're going to talk about the phrase that's become all too common in our industry, and that is one that drives me crazy, which is, I'm too busy now, you might be thinking, Rob, but being busy is just part of agency life, right? Well, that's exactly why we need to address this. You see, I'm too busy has become more than just a statement of fact. It's turned into a catch all excuse that's often used that prevents us or team members from delivering their full role or reaching their potential as agency owners and employees. Our success hinges on our ability to manage our time, fulfill all of our role managers, meet deadlines, and deliver exceptional work to our clients. When we fall back on the too busy excuse, we're not just letting ourselves down. We're potentially damaging client relationships, team morale, and our agency's reputation. And of course, it's really frustrating. It should never be an excuse for not doing your job. And so I'm on a one man mission to remove this phrase from our agency vocabulary. But here's the good news. By the end of this episode, you'll have a new perspective on what it means to be busy. And more importantly, you. You'll have practical strategies to eliminate the phrase from your agency's vocabulary. And you'll obviously be able to share some of what you learn with any team member that is telling you they're too busy. We'll explore how to take control of your time, prioritize effectively, and create a more productive, less stressful agency environment. So whether you're struggling with overwhelming workloads, missed deadlines, or you're frustrated with team members under performance, or just feeling like you're always playing catch up, this episode is for you. So let's roll our sleeves up and get ready to transform how we think and manage our time in the agency world. So let's get started. I'm Rob Da Costa, and this is the Agency Accelerator Podcast as someone who has stood in your shoes, having started, grown and sold my own agency, I know just how it feels in the ups and downs of agency life. So this podcast aims to ease your journey just a little by sharing mine and my guests experiences and advice as you navigate your way to growing a profitable, sustainable and enjoyable business. Now, I'm a bit of a storyteller and I use stories and analogies with my clients and my group coaching program to help people understand a concept. And today is no different. So let's kick things off with a little story that I think will resonate with you. Imagine you've ordered a beautiful new sofa. You spent weeks, maybe even months searching for the perfect one. You've measured your living room, you've debated colors with your partner. And finally you made the decision. You're excited. This sofa is going to transform your space. The salesperson tells you that it will be delivered in four weeks on a Monday in the morning. Perfect. You mark the date in your calendar and you book that morning off work. You move the old furniture out, and you even book friends in for that evening to show off your sofa. The big day arrives. You wake up early, have your coffee, and eagerly await by the window for the big van to arrive. 9am comes and goes. Then 10am, then noon. No sofa, no call, nothing. Finally, at 3 o', clock, you call the company and after being on hold for what feels like an eternity, you get through to customer service and what do they tell you? Oh, I'm so sorry. We were just too busy to deliver your sofa today. Can you imagine? You'd be absolutely furious, right? You've planned your entire day around this delivery. You've inconvenienced yourself, you've wasted a half day's holiday. And their excuse is simply that they were too busy. Well, in the consumer context, this sounds absolutely ridiculous. You'd probably demand a refund, you'd leave a scathing review, and you'd tell all your friends never to shop there. No reputable company would dare. We were too busy as an excuse for failing to deliver a product or a service as promised. And yet, in the agency world, we use the very same excuse all the time. We or our team members missed deadlines, delay projects, failed to respond to emails, all because we were too busy. And if you could see me, I'm putting too busy in quotes. But here's the thing. Like the sofa company, too busy is not an acceptable excuse in our professional lives. Our clients, our team members, our colleagues, and our own professional standards deserve better. So as we move through this episode, I want you to keep the sofa analogy in mind. Every time you're tempted to say I'm too busy, imagine you're that sofa company. Would you accept that excuse from them? Well, of course not. And if not, why are we accepting it from ourselves or our team members in our agency? And of course, feel free to share this analogy with your team member the next time they miss a deadline with the excuse that they were too busy. It's time to change this narrative. As I said, I'm on a mission to rid ourselves of the I'm too busy epidemic. And that's what we're going to start to uncover today. Okay, so now that we've highlighted how absurd the too busy excuse sounds in a consumer context, let's dive into why it's particularly problematic in agency life. First and foremost, I'm too busy is often used an excuse. Rather than addressing the real reason behind a delay or a missed commitment, it's become a catch all phrase that we or our team members trot out whenever they're falling short of expectations. But here's the thing. Look, everybody's busy. Your clients are busy. You're definitely busy. Your team members are busy. Saying you're too busy doesn't provide any real explanation or solution. It's a cop out, plain and simple. Secondly, and this is crucial, the too busy excuse can seriously damage both client relationships, your relationship with team members, and team morale. The constant use of the too busy excuse can be a real morale killer. When team members hear this from their leaders or their colleagues, it can lead to frustration and resentment, especially since it means they often have to pick up the slack. It might make them feel like their work isn't valued or that they're not being supported. And over time, this can create a negative work environment and even lead to burnout. Third, and this is where it gets really insidious, the too busy excuse often masks underlying issues in our agencies. It could be hiding poor time management skills, ineffective prioritisation, a competency or a motivation issue, or a tendency to over commit. By falling back on the I'm too busy, we're not addressing these root causes. We're just basically putting a plaster or band aid on a problem that needs stitches. And finally, here's the kicker. Saying I'm too busy doesn't actually solve anything, right? It's just more frustrating than anything, yet only postpones the inevitable. The work still needs to get done. The client still needs a response. That project still needs finishing. The team still needs support. By using this excuse, we're not making progress. We're just kicking the can down the road, often making the situation worse in the process. In fact, I sometimes think people are too busy telling everyone they are too busy. In essence, I'm too busy puts us in a reactive position instead of a proactive one. It's a passive statement that suggests that we're at the mercy of schedules rather than in control of them. And in the fast paced, client focused world of agencies, we simply can't afford to be passive. Remember, in our agencies, time is our most valuable resource. How we talk about it, how we use it and how we respect it can make or break our success. So it's time we take control of our time rather than letting it control us. Okay, now that we understand why I'm too busy is such a problematic phrase in agency life, let's dig deeper into what's really going on. When we find ourselves or our team members using this as their excuse for failed delivery, let's break down the real reason. Reasons first up, and the obvious one is poor prioritisation. In the fast paced world of agency life, it's easy to get caught up in the tyranny of the urgent. We jump from task to task, putting fires out, but never really move the needle on our most important projects. When everything seems important, nothing truly is. If you're constantly too busy, it might be because you're not effectively distinguishing between what's urgent and what's truly important. Remember, important tasks move the needle. Urgent feels like firefighting. Next, we've got ineffective time management. This goes hand in hand with the prioritisation piece. Maybe you're starting your day checking your emails. Before you know it, it's lunchtime and you've gone down a black hole of answering emails and you haven't tackled any of those substantial projects that are now nagging at you in the background. Or perhaps you're prone to trying to multitask. Whilst research actually shows that this decreases productivity. And I believe there's no such thing as multitasking, just single tasking. When we don't manage our time well, we end up feeling busy but not productive. And then at the end of the day, you feel like, well, that day flew past. What have I actually achieved? The third reason is a big one, and that is the difficulty of saying no to new projects or new requests. In agencies, we often want to be the hero. We obviously want to help our clients, and we want to impress our colleagues and prove our worth. So we say yes to everything that comes our way. But here's the hard truth and one of my most important phrases that I use all the time, which is every time you say yes to something, you're saying no to something else. If you can't say no, you're always going to feel too busy because you've overcommitted yourself. Fourth on our list is a lack of clear process or workflows. When we don't have established systems for handling reoccurring tasks or managing projects, we waste valuable time reinventing the wheel each time this inefficiency adds up, making us feel perpetually behind. And you've guessed it Too busy. In fact, on yesterday's group call, we spent the whole session talking about the importance of process and how to document process and how to start using those documented processes as a solid foundation to scale your agency, which is a topic for a different podcast. But nevertheless, lack of clear process and workflow is one of the issues that leads us to saying I'm too busy. Fifth, it could be a competency issue. If someone is taking way longer than they should to complete a task, it becomes easy for them to say that they are too busy, even though you look at their workload and realize that they should be able to handle more. And of course, this not only is frustrating for you as a leader, but it demotivates their colleagues. Lastly, we have inadequate resource allocation. This is particularly relevant for agency owners and project managers. If you're not effectively distributing work across your team based on their skills and their capacity and project requirements, you're setting yourselves up for bottlenecks and overwork. Some team members might be swamped, others are underutilized, leading to an overall sense of being too busy as an agency. Now, I want you to take a moment here and reflect. Which of those reasons resonates with you most? Maybe it's just one of those points that really hit home, or maybe it's all of them. The important thing is to be honest with yourself. Recognizing these underlying issues is the first step towards eliminating I'm too busy from our vocabulary. Remember, being busy isn't inherently bad. In fact, a certain level of busyness can be energizing and productive. The problem of arises when we're busy with the wrong things, or when we're using busyness as an excuse for poor performance. As agency professionals, our job is not just to be busy, but to be effective. It's about making progress on the right things, delivering value to our clients, delivering your role if you're an employee, and achieving our agency's goals and that requires us to address these root causes head on. Now that we've identified the real reasons behind the too busy excuse, let's dive into some practical strategies to eliminate this phrase from your agency's vocabulary once and for all. Remember, this isn't about working more hours. It's about working smarter and more effectively. So, first up, let's talk about time management. Now, one technique that I swear by because it works really well for me, is the Pomodoro technique. This involves working in focused 25 minute bursts followed by a short break. It's amazing at how much you can get done in these concentrated periods, and I think 25 minutes is long enough to get some meaningful work done. But it's not too long to start you worrying about other things. Another powerful method is time blocking. So at the start of each week or each day, allocate a specific time blocks for different tasks or different projects. This helps create structure, ensures that you're focusing your priorities on the things that will move the needle, and prevents you from spending too much time on any one thing. Remember, the goal here isn't to fill every minute of your day, but it is to create a rhythm that allows for focused work, taking breaks, and the flexibility to handle those unexpected issues. Secondly, in time management perspective, we need to get better at prioritisation. And I recommend using the Eisenhower matrix that again, I've spoken about before. And this involves categorizing tasks into four urgent and important, Important but not urgent, Urgent but not important, and neither urgent nor important. Now, I know that's difficult to explain in an audio podcast, but if you Google the Eisenhower matrix, you'll find out more about it. The key here is to focus your energy on the important tasks, whether they're urgent or not, and then delegate and eliminate the tasks that are neither important nor urgent. This simple framework can transform how you approach your workload and it ensures that you're not operating in the urgent all the time, which, as we've said, is firefighting. Now, the next area I want to mention is that clear communication is crucial in eliminating the too busy excuse. So set up regular check ins with your team and your clients. Now, these don't have to be locked. Even a quick 15 minute stand up can work wonders. Be proactive in your communications. If you foresee a delay, communicate it early. And this is something that I really want you to stress to your team members. In our sofa analogy, if they had called a few days before to say, I'm really sorry, we're short stuffed, we can't deliver it, then you have a few choices at that point, and the same applies for your team. If they communicate early, then you can renegotiate the contract with them, which means extending the delivery point or getting someone else to do it, or helping them shuffle around their workload. Now we often fall into the trap of over promising to impress clients or win projects, but this sets us up for failure. Be realistic about how long tasks will take, and that includes factoring in potential obstacles and always allowing for some buffer time. Once you've set a timeline, do everything in your power to stick with it, which means turning off your distractions and being focused. This builds trust and reliability, which are far more valuable than always. Just saying yes now Next, we want to be leveraging technology to our advantage, so using tools like asana, and Trello, Monday.com or other project management tools can help you track progress, manage workloads, and keep everyone on the same page. These tools provide visibility into who's doing what and when, helping prevent over commitment and ensuring everyone's clear about what they're doing and balanced workloads. The next thing I want to talk about is learning to say no or not now. This might be the most challenging strategy, but it also one of the most important. Remember, when you say no to one thing, it allows you to say yes to something else that might be more aligned with your priorities. Now if you really struggle with outright refusal, try saying not now. This leaves the door open for future opportunities while still protecting your current bandwidth. And the last point I want to talk about for agency owners and managers is effective delegation. Trust your team, assign tasks based on individual strengths and capacity and provide the necessary resources and authority to complete them. Delegation isn't about offloading work, it's about empowering your team and ensuring tasks are handled by the most appropriate person. And delegation is an art. And I've actually produced a free guide called the Art of Delegation and I'll put a link in the show notes to that. If you want to learn more about delegation now, implementing all the strategies that I've just outlined won't happen overnight. They require consistent effort and are willingness to change your ingrained habits. So start small. Pick one or two strategies to focus on initially and as these become second nature, add more. Remember, the goal here isn't to never be busy. It's to be busy with a purpose, to be in control of your time rather than at its mercy. It's about focusing on the things that will move the needle and empowering people to do the full breadth of their job it's about ultimately creating an environment where I'm too busy is replaced with I've got this handled or Let me check my schedule and get back to you. Imagine the benefits you can expect when you successfully eliminate I'm too busy from your agency's vocabulary. These aren't just some feel good outcomes. They're tangible improvements that can significantly impact your agency's success. First and foremost, you'll see a marked improvement in client satisfaction, team satisfaction, and trust. When you're no longer using too busy as an excuse, you're demonstrating reliability and professionalism. Clients will appreciate your transparency, your ability to meet deadlines, and your proactive communication. Secondly, you'll notice better team morale and productivity. When your team isn't constantly overwhelmed or scrambling to meet unrealistic deadlines, they can focus on producing their best work. They'll feel more in control of their workload, they'll feel like they're delivering the role that they're employed to do, and they'll feel more valued as professionals. This leads to increased job satisfaction, which in turn boosts productivity. And because it's a virtuous cycle that can transform your agency's culture. Third, you'll achieve more accurate project planning and delivery by being realistic about timelines and resources from the outset, you're setting your team and yourself up for success. You'll be able to deliver projects on time and on budget more consistently, which further enhances your reputation with clients and reduces stress in your team. Speaking of stress, that's our fourth benefit, reduce stress and burnout. The too busy culture often leads to a constant state of urgency, which is exhausting for everyone involved. By implementing the strategies we've discussed, you're creating a more balanced, manageable workload. This doesn't mean you won't have busy periods, but there'll be an exception rather than the rule, and your team will feel more energized, creative, in control, and resilient as a result. Finally, all these benefits converge to create one very tangible outcome, which is increased profitability. Happy clients are more likely to give you more repeat business and referrals. A productive, satisfied team is more likely to be efficient and produce high quality work. Accurate project planning means few cost overruns, and reduced burnout means less turnover, saving you significant costs associated with hiring and training new staff. The shift from too busy to effectively managed isn't about changing a phrase. It's about transforming your agency's entire approach to its work. It's about moving from a reactive stance to a proactive one. From constantly putting out fires to strategically building your agency's future. Remember, these benefits don't happen overnight. They're a result of consistent effort and a commitment to change. But I can tell you from personal experience and from working with numerous agencies, the payoff is absolutely worth it. All right, let me take a breath here, because we have covered a lot of ground today, so let me quickly recap the main points. We started with our social delivery analogy, highlighting how unacceptable the too busy excuse is in consumer context. And then we explored why it's equally problematic in agency life, damaging client relationships, team relationships, and team morale. We dug into the real reasons behind the too busy excuse, from poor prioritisation to inadequate resource allocation, competency and training. Most importantly, we discussed strategies to eliminate this phrase from your agency, including effective time management, clear communications, and learning to say no. Now, here's where the rubber meets the road. I want to challenge each of you to take action based on what you've learned today. Start by identifying where you personally use the I'm too busy excuse in agency life in your head, or with your team or with your clients. Once you've identified these instances, commit to changing your approach. Instead of I'm too busy, try responses like Let me check my schedule and get back to you with a realistic timeline or I'm currently focused on Project X, but I can help you with this next week. Remember, it's not about never being busy. It's about managing your time effectively and communicating clearly. I really encourage you to implement at least one of the strategies we've discussed today, whether it's adopting the Pomodoro technique, using the Eisenhower matrix for prioritization, or simply being more mindful about saying no. Start somewhere, because small changes can lead to big results. Now, if you found value in today's episode, I'd be really grateful. If you hit the subscribe button, your subscription helps more agency owners and professionals discover these crucial insights. And if you're feeling particularly generous, do consider leaving a review that would mean the world to me. Your feedback not only helps others find the podcast, but also helps me create content that truly serves your need. Remember, you're not too busy, but you are in control of your time and your agency's success. Until next Thursday, this is Remote Rob saying thank you so much for tuning into today's episode of the Agency Accelerator. Here's building to more efficient, profitable, and enjoyable agencies.