Being busy does not always mean your business is growing. It's easy to fill your week with teaching, admin and endless small tasks while neglecting the work that truly drives progress. Instead of measuring success by how full your schedule is, focus on the activities that strengthen, simplify and grow your business. A well-designed business creates results while still leaving you time and space to breathe.
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👋🏽 Hello! I'm Sumantha McMahon, and I've supported over 100 tutors and education business owners.
As a teacher 'dropout' turned professional tutor, combined with my 20+ years as a business owner, I'm in it with you! Yes, I'm qualified too :-)
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I want to talk about busyness and the assumption that a full week is a sign of a healthy business. It's a really natural thing to believe. And if that's what you want, you know, if that's the way you want to work, then well, it it is a sign of success totally, or it's a sign of a healthy business. But most of us don't really want to work like that, not ideally. You know, you finish a packed week, you're tired, you've barely sat down, and some part of you feels reassured by that.
Sumantha (:
Look how much I did, look how full it was. Surely all that activity means things are going well. We are taught from very early on to treat being busy as proof that we're doing something right. But a full week and growing a business are not the same thing, and confusing the two can keep you running hard for years without really getting anywhere fast. Think about all the things that fill a typical tutor's week.
Sumantha (:
The teaching, yes, but also the admin, the emails, the sh you know, scheduling, the chasing, the resending of invoices, the endless small tasks that swarm around the work like flies. You can be rushed off your feet from Monday to Friday and have spent almost none of that time on anything that actually grows the business. Busy, certainly, moving forward, not really. There is a difference between motion and progress.
Sumantha (:
Motion is doing things, lots of things, feeling the wheels spinning, the hours filling, the to-do lists shrinking and then refilling. Progress is the business actually becoming stronger, better positioned, more profitable, easier to run, more sustainable. And it is perfectly possible to have heaps of the first whilst making almost none of the second. The reason this matters is that busyness is so seductive because it feels productive. It quietens the guilt.
Sumantha (:
It lets you tell yourself you're working hard, which you are. But hard work pointed at the wrong things or at no particular thing at all doesn't really build anything. It just wears you out and gives you the comforting illusion that you must be getting somewhere. this is one of my core beliefs about how a business should be built. Designed, not busy. Good enough is fine for getting through you know, through a Tuesday.
Sumantha (:
But it's not how you want to be building the thing that's meant to support your whole life and your future. The day-to-day can be a bit scrappy. It's the design underneath that needs to be deliberate. So I'd invite you every now and again to just look at a full week with a more honest eye. Instead of asking how much you did, ask how much of it you did that actually moved your business forward. Sometimes the answer is really heartening.
Sumantha (:
And sometimes it reveals that you have been busy for the sake of being busy and that the real work, the work that will actually grow things, keeps getting pushed to the bottom of the pile underneath that noise. This is probably, I would say, at the core of the work that I do with my one-to-one clients. And they come to me because they want to break the cycle. They they need that second brain. They need someone to tell them, well, how do I release time from this busyness so that I can.
Sumantha (:
focus on growing my business and making it more sustainable and making it feel less chaotic. A quieter week with two hours of the right work can actually do more for your business than a frantic one filled with, I don't know, a 60 hour week filled with the entirely wrong things. I have to remind myself of this a lot and I'm sharing it with you that busy is not the goal. A business that's growing while leaving you room to breathe, well, that's the goal.
