This week was a classic, “whack-a-mole” week.  One of those work weeks where there are a million and one things to do and that the faster you knock things off the list, the faster that new ones appear.  In my old office I had hung a Mario Andretti quote, “if everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough”.  I believe in it wholeheartedly.  My only caveat would be that in the startup world where stasis is death, extreme levels of busyness can easily be mistaken for positive momentum.

I think that one of the real keys to success is to understand when this frantic pace is actually contributing to building a foundation for long-term success and when it is just busyness.  If you get distracted by thinking, “I’m so damn busy, something good must be happening”, you risk whacking the wrong moles and spinning your wheels.

We’ve got an all-day management meeting this week that we do once a quarter to pull our heads-up out of the day to day.  I’m sometimes guilty of rolling my eyes at these kinds of strategy sessions as I think they can distract from the “doing”, but this is one of those times that I am thankful to be working with a business partner/friend/CEO who has far more intuition than I do about when to focus at the 100,000 foot level and can force me to come out of the weeds.

You can’t build a successful company without whacking the moles, but it pays to plan a bit about which moles to whack.