The Alternative Manager’s Guide to Getting Things Done

This story is excerpted from the cover story from INSTORE’s January 2026 edition, “The Alternative Manager’s Toolkit” by Chris Burslem.

Challenge/Task: Getting Things Done

Traditional Playbook: Most business owners and managers believe that to be productive, they must grind through long hours, hustle relentlessly, and stay busy. This “long work” approach emphasizes diligence, persistence, and sheer effort—often equating busyness with productivity.

The Problem: Burnout, reduced focus, and diminishing returns are common outcomes of relentless grind. Long hours can lead to fatigue and sloppy work, while the underlying productivity may suffer. Moreover, staying busy doesn’t necessarily mean you’re working on the right things or making meaningful progress. Indeed, it’s not uncommon for people to use being busy as a ruse to actually avoid critically important but uncomfortable actions that would make a real difference.

The Alternative Manager’s Fix: Rather than associating being busy with being productive, adopt the mindset that busyness can be lazy thinking. Focus on smart work — prioritizing high-impact tasks, eliminating distractions, and working efficiently. Being strategically mindful and avoiding indiscriminate action leads to faster, more effective results with less wasted effort.

How to Make It Happen

• Practice radical prioritization: identify the few tasks — maybe pick just one — that will have the greatest impact and focus on them. The pioneering management guru Peter Drucker suggested the best way to do this was by constantly asking yourself the question “What’s the most important thing for me to be doing right now?”
• Embrace the mindset that true productivity is about focused, deliberate effort, not endless hours.
• Limit your working hours — quality over quantity — so each hour counts more. One easy way to do it is to erase a day from your schedule. Don’t pencil in anything for Fridays. (Don’t worry, you’ll still be busy on Friday.)
• Schedule focused time blocks — avoid multitasking and minimize distractions (meaning put your phone out of reach!!!) during important work. Let your staff know, when the door to your office is closed, it means “Do not disturb.”
• Lighten up. There is much evidence that levity supports a better workplace—it encourages people to take risks, come up with more imaginative ideas, while happy staff are more productive, healthier and less likely to leave.
• Running around in what appears to be a hyper-productive whirl looks impressive but it’s usually self-defeating. You tire yourself out, resulting in work that needs to be done over, or in little getting done the following day. Ironically, the more time you give yourself to do individual tasks, the more things you will strike off your to-do list, says Elizabeth Grace Saunders, a time coach and author of “The 3 Secrets to Effective Time Investment: Achieve More Success With Less Stress.” It was an approach Pablo Picasso, who got a bit done in his life, endorsed: “You must always work not just within, but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two … In that way, the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery, and you create a feeling of strength in reserve.”
• Get the rest you need. Ironically, while hustle culture would have you believe that every hour and minute of our time should be put to good use — if not at work, then in self-improvement—it’s actually false. Our bodies are like a farmer’s fields — to reap the best harvest, they need fallow periods too.