When Doing More Starts Costing You (and it’s Not Money)
Doing more work than you should is costing you, and members of your team, progress.
Most leaders don’t slow down because they’re unmotivated, they slow down because they’re doing too much.
The irony? The more they do, the less progress they see.
At first glance, taking on more feels efficient. Jumping in, fixing something yourself, or moving a task forward can feel like the quickest path to results. But what feels like progress in the moment often carries a quiet cost — time, clarity, and capacity.
That’s the paradox of productivity: doing more doesn’t always mean achieving more.
The Illusion of Efficiency
On average, I have about 15 new executive client calls each month. These calls are an incredible window into how leaders think about productivity. During a majority of the calls, I hear from executives, “It’s just faster if I do it myself.”
Explaining takes time. Following up takes effort. But while doing it yourself might save a few minutes today, it often costs you hours later in the week.
The time you save on task completion is lost in opportunity; time that could’ve been used for strategy, decision-making, or long-term thinking.
That’s not efficiency. That’s effort misplacement.
When Effort Outpaces Return
This is where Time Economics™ changes the conversation.
Time Economics is about evaluating not just how time is used, but how effort is applied within that time.
In many organizations, leaders pour their highest energy into low-return activities — approvals, fixes, and tasks others could handle with the right context. That’s not a skill gap. It’s a misuse of capacity. With time being fixed, that makes your time-capacity only so much and the way you spend each minute determines traction and progress.
When you continue doing more yourself, your effort allocation is incorrectly distributed. You can’t scale impact when too much is still in your hands.
The Leadership Signal
Doing everything yourself doesn’t communicate dedication, it communicates constraint.
Leaders who delegate and design systems that move without them create a different kind of influence:
They demonstrate trust in their team. (This is the biggest factor with leaders doing more, low trust in others.)
They model decision-making confidence.
They optimize their personal capacity through structure, not speed.
Delegation isn’t a handoff, it’s a transfer of clarity and ownership. It’s how leaders multiply progress rather than maintain it.
(If letting go feels challenging, explore the mindset behind it in Delegation Struggles: Why Letting Go Builds Capacity.)
Now What?
If your day feels packed with activity but light on strategy, it’s time to look at how your effort is being spent.
That’s the focus of my Time Economics Workshop. Together, we uncover where time and effort are being overused, misplaced, or under leveraged, then redesign how effort could flow, so progress compounds instead of stalls.
Because at some point, doing more doesn’t create value, it costs you the capacity to work and lead effectively.