2026 Productivity: Ditch Grooming, Achieve Goals

Sarah, a marketing director for an e-commerce startup in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward, was completely underwater. Even with 12-hour days packed with meetings and emails, she had that sinking feeling she wasn’t making any real progress. She was desperate to achieve her business goals, but the constant barrage of requests meant she spent more time on organizational tasks than on the strategic work that actually matters. This is a common story. The real challenge is breaking out of the “planning” phase and into actually getting things done.

The Unseen Drain: How “Grooming” Stifles Progress

Sarah’s problem wasn’t that she wasn’t working hard enough. Her effort was just pointed in the wrong direction. She was great at organizing her inbox, color-coding her calendar, and making detailed to-do lists. These things feel productive and give you a quick sense of control, but they did nothing to help her company’s quarterly revenue or market expansion goals. I call this “grooming,” and it’s any task that’s about organization but doesn’t actually push a core objective forward. It’s like spending all day sharpening your axe instead of felling any trees.

A 2024 Gallup survey found that only 36% of employees feel engaged at work, and that number is often tied to feeling bogged down by administrative junk instead of doing meaningful work. Sarah was stuck in this loop. Her morning would start with an hour of “planning,” but that usually just meant answering non-urgent emails or fiddling with presentation slides that were already good enough. That pre-work ritual ate up the exact mental energy she needed for her main goal: launching their new direct-to-consumer initiative by Q3.

The Shift: Identifying and Prioritizing True “Doing”

To help Sarah, we first had to get crystal clear on what “doing” actually meant for her job. We sat down and mapped her quarterly KPIs right back to the direct-to-consumer launch. For that project, “doing” was finalizing vendor contracts, building the marketing funnel, and locking down influencer partnerships. Anything else, like formatting a departmental report or joining an optional team-building event, was “grooming.” Once you make that distinction explicit, it’s a real eye-opener.

The Eisenhower Matrix is a great tool for this, sorting everything into four boxes: urgent/important, not urgent/important, urgent/not important, and not urgent/not important. Most of that “grooming” stuff lives in the urgent/not important or the not urgent/not important boxes. The real work, the “doing”, is almost always in the “not urgent/important” quadrant, and it demands you to be proactive. That’s the quadrant for innovation, growth, and building long-term value. Sarah quickly saw she was living in the “urgent/not important” box, just reacting to things that weren’t tied to her big goals.

Implementing Deep Work Blocks: A Case Study in Focus

So, we re-engineered her schedule to make room for actual “doing.” We blocked out time for deep work, Cal Newport’s term for distraction-free, focused concentration that really pushes you mentally. For Sarah, this looked like two 90-minute, non-negotiable blocks each day dedicated only to the direct-to-consumer project. During these blocks, email was off, her door was closed, and her team knew she was off-limits.

Of course, it didn’t work perfectly right away. People still knocked, “urgent” emails piled up, and she had to fight the twitch to check her phone. This is where you just have to be disciplined. We set up a system where her assistant triaged communications, and she’d deal with them later in a designated “grooming” window. She put on noise-canceling headphones and a literal “do not disturb” sign. The first week was a mess, but by the second week, she found a rhythm.

The results were obvious. In just three weeks, Sarah finalized two vendor contracts that had been sitting for months and she also drafted the entire marketing strategy outline, something she’d only been able to peck at before. This kind of focus let her tackle complex problems that required real thought, the kind of work you simply can’t do in 15-minute sprints between meetings.

The Power of Strategic Delegation and Automation

Delegating and automating was the next step in the “less grooming, more doing” plan. Sarah found a few recurring tasks that were necessary but didn’t need her personal touch. For example, she was spending almost two hours every Monday morning compiling sales reports. We worked with ops to build an automated dashboard that pulled data from their CRM, Salesforce, and created the report for her. Just like that, she got two hours of her week back.

She also started having a junior marketing associate do the initial screening for influencer applications. Sarah still made the final call, but she didn’t have to waste hours sifting through hundreds of profiles. This saved her a ton of time and gave a junior team member a great chance to step up. A 2023 McKinsey Global Institute report backs this up, showing that companies using automation for routine stuff can see productivity jump 10% to 25%. The point is to reallocate your smart people to higher-value work.

Cultivating a Culture of “Doing”

When Sarah’s team saw her blocking off time and making real headway on big projects, they started to change, too. She encouraged them to find their own “doing” tasks and protect time for them. It wasn’t a mandate from on high. It was just them seeing what worked. They started to ask if every meeting was really necessary and pushed for clearer agendas. That’s how real cultural change happens: people see it works and they copy it.

One of the biggest things to fix was the expectation of an instant response. That constant availability is a productivity killer. We set a simple policy for Sarah’s team: non-urgent messages would get a reply within four hours, and anything truly critical had to go through a dedicated chat channel for immediate fires. That simple change took a huge amount of pressure off everyone to be constantly watching their inbox and gave them space to focus.

Technology is a double-edged sword here and you have to be intentional about it. A tool like Asana or Slack can be a huge help for getting things done, or it can be a massive distraction machine, all depending on how you set it up. Sarah’s team moved all project discussions into specific Slack channels, which cut down on DMs and made conversations easy to find later. This simple change reduced all the time they used to waste hunting for information or re-explaining things, a classic “grooming” activity.

The Warning Signs: When Grooming Becomes a Crutch

You have to be honest with yourself and notice when “grooming” is just a way to procrastinate. Organizing, planning, and tweaking things can feel good, but it’s often a way to avoid the harder, mentally draining work of “doing.” Sarah admitted that sometimes she’d spend an extra 30 minutes making a spreadsheet header look perfect because she was dreading a tough vendor call. This is where you need some self-awareness and accountability.

I tell my clients to ask themselves a simple question before they start any task: “Is this directly helping one of my top 3 goals for the week?” If the answer is no, you have to figure out if you can delegate it, automate it, or just delete it. It’s about ruthless prioritization. The goal is to make your grooming tasks as efficient as possible so you can spend the vast majority of your time and energy on work that actually moves the needle.

The startup’s direct-to-consumer launch, which had been lagging, went live in the first week of Q3 and beat its initial sales projections by 15% in the first month. It wasn’t all Sarah, of course, but her shift from reactive grooming to proactive doing was a huge part of what got the project across the finish line faster. Her team also felt more engaged and less stressed because they were contributing to real outcomes instead of just spinning their wheels on process.

The lesson from Sarah’s story is that productivity is about working on the right things. It means you have to constantly and consciously separate the tasks that are just about organizing from the tasks that actually push you forward. For any professional who wants to get great results, making that distinction is foundational to their success.