February 7, 2026

Read Time - 4 minutes

"It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?"

~ Henry David Thoreau

Do me a favor… Pull up your calendar from last week. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Now ask yourself: How much of that time was spent on work that will actually matter six months from now?

If you're like most people? Probably less than 20%.

The rest was email triage. Putting out fires. Sitting in meetings where you barely spoke. Solving problems your team could've handled. You cleared 80 emails. Approved 12 routine requests. Handled 5 office walk-in "quick questions" that somehow turned into 30-minute conversations.

But that curriculum redesign you know needs to happen? That faculty development plan? That partnership with industry you've been "meaning to explore"?

Still waiting for you to have time.

Here's a hard lesson that took me awhile to learn:

We're not too busy for strategic work. We're too busy doing work that feels productive instead of work that is productive.

And here's the irony: How many of us sat in a meeting this year talking about student wellbeing? Or advocated for better faculty work-life balance?

While working nights and weekends ourselves.

We all do it. Faculty talk about reducing student stress while grading at midnight. Administrators talk about workload while answering emails at 10pm. Leaders advocate for boundaries while modeling the opposite.

We see the problem everywhere except in the mirror.

3 Systems Working Against You

This isn't a discipline problem. Too many hardworking, strategic thinkers are stuck in this same loop for that to be the real issue. There's something deeper at play.

1. The system rewards reactive work

Columbia Business School professor Silvia Bellezza and her colleagues discovered something uncomfortable about knowledge-intensive economies like higher education. In their study "Conspicuous Consumption of Time: When Busyness and Lack of Leisure Time Become a Status Symbol," they found that people who described themselves as "extremely busy" and having no free time were perceived as having higher status and competence than those with leisure time.

As they write: "A busy and overworked lifestyle, rather than a leisurely lifestyle, has become an aspirational status symbol."

In higher ed especially, being constantly needed = being valuable. Being indispensable = being competent.

Your 60-hour work week isn't a bug. It's a feature of the culture.

2. Your brain craves reactive work

UC Irvine researcher Gloria Mark has spent two decades studying how we interact with technology. Her research shows we spend an average of just 47 seconds on any screen before switching our attention.

Why? Task-switching triggers dopamine release. Neuroscience research in Nature Neuroscience shows that dopamine amplifies the perceived benefits of quick, reactive tasks while diminishing the costs. Every time you answer an email, solve a quick problem, or cross something off your list, your brain gets a small reward. That reward feels good. Your brain wants more.

The cruel irony? Strategic work—the work that actually moves your department forward—doesn't give you that immediate hit. It's slower. Harder. Less gratifying.

So your brain keeps pulling you back to email. To quick wins. To being the person everyone needs.

I deal with this myself. I have to be intentional about staying focused on one task without getting distracted by something smaller that I can knock out in under five minutes.

Think about it:

• Answering emails ≠ building strategic partnerships

• Solving scheduling conflicts ≠ developing next-gen programs

• Being available 24/7 ≠ creating a culture that thrives

To your brain, they're all just wins.

3. The culture expects reactive work

UK research on academic collegiality in Teaching in Higher Education reveals a troubling pattern: increased workloads and expectations for "collegial" service have made it increasingly difficult for academics to maintain boundaries.

As the researchers note: "Collegiality can be used to extract hidden academic labour... The performance of collegiality became inseparable from the performance of an ideal worker who was constantly available."

Setting boundaries gets labeled "uncollegial." Protecting your time feels like letting people down. Studies show that collegiality is sometimes weaponized to extract labor, particularly from women and marginalized groups.

The result? You stay on the treadmill. And you pull the next generation of leaders onto it with you.

Bottom Line

The strategic work can get done. The curriculum redesign. The faculty development. The partnerships that could transform your program. You don't have to choose between doing work that matters and having a life outside of work.

The question isn't whether you're capable of leading well—you clearly are. The real question is whether the work that defines great leadership has to happen at 9pm on a Tuesday. On Saturday mornings. During the time you could be with your family, pursuing other interests, or simply living your life. It doesn't. Some of you may genuinely love working evenings and weekends—I get it. But let that be a choice, not a necessity for getting the work done.

The work that determines whether your unit thrives or merely survives doesn't have to consume your personal life. Different systems make different outcomes possible. Someone gets to model what sustainable leadership actually looks like in higher ed. Let it be you.

Thanks for reading. See you next Saturday!

If you want help building systems to actually do this, I'm hosting a free workshop on February 19 at 12pm CST.

I'll walk through the same frameworks I used to recapture my focus on the work that matters most. We'll cover:

• How to stop being the bottleneck — redirect decisions so your team builds real capacity (and you get your time back)

• How to protect time for strategic work — without working nights and weekends or damaging relationships

• How to redesign your week — so vision-setting and culture-building happen during work hours, not Sunday nights

Register here → https://luma.com/pysobaie

P.S. A chair I've worked with recently told me: "I realized I was perpetuating the exact culture I was complaining about, and these systems helped me get off the treadmill."

That's what this is really about. Not just reclaiming your time. Changing what leadership looks like in higher ed.