I Used to Brag About Being Busy. Then I Counted…
Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez is a leading expert in project management and strategy implementation, recognized by Thinkers50 with the prestigious award “Ideas into Practice.” He is the creator of concepts like The Project Economy and the Project Manifesto. He is author of Lead Successful Projects (2019, Penguin) The Project Revolution (2019, LID) and The Focused Organization (2012 Gower). He has been teaching project management for more than a decade to senior executives at Duke CE, Skolkovo, Solvay Business School, and Vlerick. Antonio has held executive PMO positions at PricewaterhouseCoopers, BNP Paribas, and GlaxoSmithKline. Former Chairman of the Project Management Institute, he is the co-founder of the Strategy Implementation Institute and the global movement Brightline.
For years, my calendar was my evidence.
Back to back. Two projects, then five, then more than I could name without checking. When somebody asked how things were going, I said busy—and I meant it as a boast.
Busy meant needed. Busy meant trusted. Busy meant the work mattered, and therefore so did I.
I ran teams that way too, and I was proud of how much we were carrying.
Then I started counting.
Not my hours. The portfolio.
In one global consumer products company, we sat down to map what was genuinely in flight—not what the leadership team believed was in flight, but what was actually running, consuming people.
We found more than 250 initiatives. Around a quarter of them had no accountable sponsor at all. Several hadn’t shown measurable progress in months. All of them were still eating budget, attention and evenings.
At a multinational bank, a portfolio review turned up something starker still: more active initiatives than project managers to lead them.
Nobody in either organization was lazy. Everybody was busy. And the work still wasn’t landing.
That was when the boast stopped sounding like a boast.
Because here is what those counts actually told me, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to hear it: Busy is not a symptom of ambition. It is a symptom of unmade decisions.
Every initiative on your plate that nobody …
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