Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More - Softcover

Gallagher, Bill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 197262007X ISBN 13: 9781972620076

Publisher: GracePoint Publishing, 2026

Synopsis

What if the thing keeping your company small is you?

You built something real. People depend on you. So why does growth feel heavier than it should?

In Busy Is Broken, veteran CEO coach Bill Gallagher names the trap that catches even the most talented leaders: busyness itself. Most leaders wear busyness like a badge. Packed calendars, constant decisions, always the last one out the door. It feels like leadership. It isn't.

The secret isn't working harder, managing time better, or finding the right productivity app. It's redesigning the system that keeps producing the chaos you're managing.

Through the stories of real leaders―some who broke free, some who didn't―and a sharp diagnostic tool rooted in four common leadership sins, Busy Is Broken offers a structural fix, not a motivational pep talk. Inside, you'll learn to delegate with authority, identify the work only you should do, and build a company that doesn't require you in every room.

Ambitious leaders don't have to burn out to break through.

Do less. Lead better. Scale further.

About this title

About the Author

Bill Gallagher is a business coach who helps CEOs and entrepreneurs scale without losing their minds. After forty plus years as an entrepreneur and executive, leading four companies as CEO and helping grow two others from startup to over half a billion in revenue, he now coaches leaders and teams in thirty-nine cities across eighteen countries.
A former DJ and radio executive, Bill hosts the Scaling Up Podcast. When he's not coaching, he's probably surfing, sailing, skiing, flying, or diving. Basically anything that moves. He and his wife Lori have lived in the Oakland Hills for thirty years and raised two kids: a son who's a leading AI scientist and a daughter who's a creative director in music and entertainment. He's also a proud grandpa.

From the Back Cover

YOUR HARD WORK MIGHT BE HURTING YOUR COMPANY.
Not in the vague, wellness-poster way. In the concrete, measurable way.
The CEO who can't take two weeks off without the phone blowing up has failed to delegate. The founder rewriting every slide deck at midnight isn't committed, he's the bottleneck. We wear busy like a badge and call it commitment. Some of us refuse to grow at all, to protect some kind of life, and feel guilty about that too. Nobody is exempt.
Bill Gallagher has coached more than 800 companies across eighteen countries, and he has watched the same trap close on all of them. Busy Is Broken names it, explains why it is so hard to escape, and gives you a way out you can start on Monday.
Inside:
The Four Sins that turn a leader into a bottleneck
The Five Engines that keep you stuck there
The Italy Test, for whether your company survives two weeks without you
What the research says actually happens to output past fifty-five hours a week
Do less. Scale more.

From the Inside Flap

We all know the script. No pain, no gain. Hustle. Grind. Lean in. We are uncomfortable not being busy, and when things get hard our instinct is to get busier. We have all heard "work smart, not hard," but the honest truth is that most founders only trust one gear.
Bill Gallagher spent forty years in that gear. Four companies as CEO, two others grown from startup past 550 million, and a long stretch of believing that the person who worked the hardest deserved to win. Then he spent a decade coaching CEOs in eighteen countries and discovered the pattern was universal, and that it was costing every one of them the thing they actually wanted.
Busy Is Broken is the book about what happens next. It is built on real stories: the founder texting his team at 2:07 in the morning from the other side of the world. The CEO still doing everyone's eighth-grade group project. The owner who wanted out at seventy, took seven more years to get there, and sold for a fraction of what the company was worth.
It is also built on evidence. Gallagher is completing doctoral research on the relationship between the hours a leader works and how effective that leader actually is. The findings are not flattering to the hustle.
Most books tell you to manage your time better. This one argues that busy is an identity problem, not a scheduling problem, and that no system will hold until the belief underneath it changes. Then it gives you the diagnostic, the frameworks, and the specific shifts that let a company grow past the person who started it.
For any leader who is running hard and getting nowhere.

Edition details

• Publisher: GracePoint Publishing
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 197262007X
• ISBN 13: 9781972620076
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 230