We don't want our engineers busy. Here's why

👋 Welcome to today’s edition of Build & lead (formerly the CTO blueprint), a newsletter by Appolica. Every two weeks, we dive deep into the tech, product, and leadership challenges that keep founders up at night.

Being busy feels good. It gives you (and your team) a sense of accomplishment, like you're putting in maximum effort. But here's the twist: being busy doesn't mean you’re productive. In fact, staying busy with no real purpose can be downright dangerous.

Why do we fall into the busy trap? Filling up your calendar or to-do list is easy. It's a tangible way to show you're working hard. We’re constantly fed stories that glorify the 24/7 hustle as the only path to success. “Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week”, as Elon Musk put it.

However, what’s missing from this narrative is a crucial element: impact. Hard work for the sake of hard work isn't productive. It's a recipe for burnout.

How do you know if your team is stuck in the busy cycle? It’s not always obvious and long hours and packed calendars can definitely feel productive. But if work keeps piling up without meaningful progress, something’s off. Look out for these red flags:

Imagine this: There’s a new project coming up. The CTO lays out the plan, expecting feedback and questions. No one has time to review specs, contribute ideas, or help break down tasks. Every engineer is maxed out, fully booked for weeks, handling multiple priorities with no breathing room.

If no one has time for a new project, it means:

• There’s no flexibility in your roadmap for unexpected priorities.

• Knowledge-sharing and mentorship aren’t happening because everyone is too busy firefighting.

• The team is working at capacity, which means they have no capacity for anything beyond their immediate tasks.

Have a look at your team’s calendars. What do you see?

Meetings eating up 30% of their time, scattered randomly throughout the day, and a never-ending stream of Slack threads. As a result, engineers struggle to get into flow.

Someone pulled an all-nighter to ship a feature. You gave them a bonus. Nobody even knows the feature exists. Rewarding effort over impact is how teams end up optimizing for busyness instead of outcomes.

Reward the work that actually moves the business forward. Prioritize meaningful outcomes over time spent. Celebrate the feature that solves a real user problem, not the one that took the longest to build.

Look at your past releases. Are tasks consistently finished at the last possible moment or overdue? If that’s the case, you might assume the team needs to work harder, plan better, or just “push through”. But missed deadlines aren’t usually a productivity issue. They’re a priority issue. Here’s why:

• Teams don’t have enough buffer time to handle unexpected blockers.

• Work is being estimated optimistically, not realistically.

• The backlog is full of low-impact tasks that drain energy but don’t move the business forward.

When deadlines are a recurring problem, the answer isn’t to pressure the team into working faster. You have to reevaluate what’s being worked on in the first place.

Three all-hands meetings in a row. The same charts. The same updates. Growth is flat. Nobody seems particularly concerned.

This is a dangerous place to be. When teams get too caught up in the process of working, they stop questioning whether their work is actually making an impact. If your team is measuring progress in hours worked and tasks completed instead of real business outcomes, something is broken.

The planning meeting starts. The team looks at the backlog. Instead of discussing what’s most impactful, they start filling the sprint until capacity is maxed out:

• No one questions if these tasks actually matter.

• There’s no discussion about what moves the business forward.

• The goal isn’t to deliver meaningful work, it’s to stay busy.

This is the difference between output and impact. A team that fills every sprint to 100% capacity might look efficient, but if they’re just completing tasks for the sake of completing tasks, they’re missing the point.

Great teams don’t focus on how much work they can squeeze into a sprint. They focus on delivering the highest-impact work first.

A new request comes in.

“If we don’t do this now, sales will collapse!”

The team drops everything. Then, another urgent request lands. Same reaction.

When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.

If your team is constantly pivoting to the loudest request, you’re firefighting. Urgency shouldn’t be a justification for immediate action. Instead of rushing to put out fires, good teams ask:

• Does this align with our core goals?

• What happens if we don’t do it?

• Is this more important than what we’re already working on?

If the answer isn’t obvious, pause. Not every flashing red light is a real emergency.

Churn is a problem. The product team finally has an idea how to fix it. The response? "We already have a roadmap for the next three months. Maybe later."

Roadmaps should be a guide, not a blocker. If the team is dismissing high-impact ideas just because they weren’t planned three months ago, you’re optimizing for predictability, not progress.

Ask someone what just happened in that meeting. “We discussed [X].” Cool. And what’s next? Silence.

If there’s no agenda, cancel the meeting. No decision? End it early. No next steps? Don’t schedule it again.

If staying busy was the key to success, every overbooked team would be thriving. But they’re not.

At Appolica, we’ve reworked how we operate to cut the noise and focus only on impact. Here’s our approach.

We set specific, quantifiable objectives at both team and individual levels.

We have company goals. Each team and each project also have their own goals. If you’re working on something, you should be able to answer:

• Why does this matter?

• How does it contribute to the team/project goal?

• How does it contribute to the company goal?

If the answer isn’t clear, you need to rethink what’s being done.

We appreciate hard work, but we only reward outcomes that truly matter on company level.

We no longer pay overtime, and all bonuses are now tied to company growth and business results.

We value team performance more than individual effort. We believe that when the company succeeds, everyone benefits.

That’s why we share yearly profits with all team members and everyone gets equity from our portfolio of startups.

We know that context-switching kills productivity.

That’s why we’ve made deep, focused work a priority. We cut unnecessary meetings. We set meeting-free days to give everyone uninterrupted time to work. We reduce Slack noise by keeping discussions async unless something is truly urgent.

Repetitive tasks drain time, focus, and distract us from our goals. We cut them wherever we can.

We ditched time tracking, introduced tools to automate routine work, and removed unnecessary admin overhead. All of these were done to reduce the amount of distractions everybody has and increase the joy they have from their work.

Finishing early shouldn’t be punished with more tasks. When someone meets their goals ahead of schedule, we don’t immediately pile on more work.

Instead, we give them the freedom to push their limits further and explore new ideas. Punishing efficiency with more tasks does nothing but kill motivation and creativity.

The end goal isn't to be busy. It's to make an impact.

By focusing on results rather than activity, we're building a team that's not just busy, but truly productive.

Next time when you or your team feel overwhelmed, pause. Ask yourself: “Are we moving the business forward, or just keeping ourselves occupied?”

Only work that creates impact is what counts.

Got feedback or just want to get in touch? Reply to this email and we’ll get back to you.

Want to see more of us? Have a look at our LinkedIn account. Interested in what we do? Visit appolica.com.

Thanks for reading & until next time.

Best,

Martin & the Appolica team