🦾 Busy is nothing

Busy is a trap. The only question that matters: did you do something hard?

Jul 03, 2026

Busy is a trap.

It feels good. You get the dopamine, you move pixels and text around, and you feel like you did something. But what did you do?

Did you close a deal? Did you send that email you’ve been avoiding? Did you make that phone call that you’ve been putting off?

The only question for the modern age is: did you do something that matters?

According to the 80/20 law, about 80% of what we do that generates barely 20% of our results is mostly trivial.

It’s the 20% that generates the 80% (often more) that matters.

Yet, as humans, we avoid the 20% because it’s often hard.

And where do we spend our time? Frolocing around in the 20% bucket—or worse, in the nothingburger bucket.

Once I fired myself from checking email every day, email started to matter way less. I now have less email, and less of what I am doing depends on it. Funny how that works.

(Of course, I do have a daily Claude skill that moves all of my email into specific folders + suggests AUTO filter rules for inbox offense, so that helps.)

I used to pride myself on inbox zero. I felt accomplished. I moved faster than almost everyone in email terms.

And what I figured out is it didn’t matter all that much. In fact, a lot of it was literal busy work wasting my time.

The same is true for every trivial task that gives you a dopamine spike but is not actually doing much.

-Colin
X-IG-TT

P.S. SCREENS WRECK YOUR OBIOLOGY. I know because I’m on screens for hours each day. And I started to feel it: Headaches, eye strain, blurry vision at night… and that wired feeling lying in bed when I should be falling to sleep. The cause? Bright screens and blue light. And that’s why I now wear these during the day (and at night when relaxing): LITEZ Screen Lens. BH readers get 10% off using code BHNL.

📰 High agency

A 30-min read on the defining skill to win the AI age. Worth your time.

🎧 Full guide: how to unlock extreme focus on command by Dan Koe. 14 million reads for a reason.

📰 Links

🛠️ One Build — The Output Ledger

Open Claude. Dump everything you did last week: every task, meeting, tab, and "productive" hour.
Ask: "Sort these into OUTPUT (produced a result someone would pay for) versus MOTION (felt busy, moved nothing). Be ruthless."
Add up the hours sitting in MOTION. That number is your busywork tax.
Tomorrow, protect your first 2 hours for ONE real output before any motion is allowed to touch your day.

🎯 Skill — SHIP ONE PROOF

Spend 60 minutes producing one thing that proves you can do the work: a finished piece, a shipped feature, a closed call.

Not a plan, not a list, not a meeting, a result with your name on it.

Make it tangible, live, done, shippable.

📈 Markets

🟢 Winners

Apple (AAPL) +4.46% — Big Tech. Led the Dow to a fresh record high into the long weekend.
McDonald’s (MCD) +3.34% — Big consumer/Dow name; classic rotation-into-defense move.
Kemper (KMPR) +9.7% — Insurer; financials were among the day’s strongest sectors. (this figure was the premarket print)

🔴 Losers

Tesla (TSLA) −6.43% — Sold off despite record Q2 deliveries of 480,126 vehicles. Textbook buy-the-rumor.
Meta (META) −3.78% — Megacap tech got hit as semis and AI names gave back first-half gains.
Caterpillar (CAT) −3.20% — Big industrial; heaviest drag on the Dow’s up day.

🐦 Tweet

Sahil Bloom@SahilBloom

WARNING: Longer post (but worth reading or bookmarking for later). Your life has seasons. Each one is unique. Characterized by its own distinct desires, struggles, opportunities, and identity. But one reflection I've had recently is just how easy it is to completely

12:36 PM · Jul 2, 2026 · 1.1M Views

251 Replies · 722 Reposts · 4.64K Likes

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📊 Stats

18% of Americans think they could safely land a passenger plane in an emergency with air traffic control talking them down. Confidence is not capability. Source: Numlock.
US homeowners installed a record 673 megawatts of home battery storage in Q1 2026, even after federal incentives were stripped. Source: Numlock.
A metric ton of ammonium paratungstate jumped from 343 dollars in January to over 3,000 dollars now, each shipped container worth about 2 million dollars. Source: Numlock.

🔥 Useful Sh!t Corner 🔥

🗓️ On this day in 1886 → Karl Benz gave the first public demonstration of his Motorwagen, the first true automobile, in Mannheim, Germany.
🦾 How to be dangerous → Batch every "quick" notification into two windows a day. Interruptions are motion pretending to be work.
🌞 Health → Get 10 minutes of morning sunlight before your first screen. It anchors your circadian clock and steadies your energy all day.
🍳 Cooking → Salt your eggs a few minutes before you scramble them, not after. The salt breaks down the proteins for softer curds.
💬 Quote → "It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?" —Henry David Thoreau
🤖 AI reality check → AI removes the excuse of busywork. When the grunt work is automated, all that is left to judge you on is real output.

P.S. I’m on screens for hours each day. Headaches, eye strain, blurry vision at night… then that weird feeling when I lie down to sleep, even though I should be exhausted and falling asleep fast.

🧰 The Stack & The Goods

🛠️ The tools I actually run my business on → My Apps Stack (click here)

🛒 My favorite products, with subscriber discounts → My Favorite Products

👓 Starting at screens for hours each day started giving me headaches and blurry vision at night. Blue light and eye strain were the culprit. And it’s why I now wear these daily: LITEZ Screen Glasses. BH readers get 10% off using code BHNL

👋 I’m Colin → Father, AI builder, founder, investor. X-IG-TT → Free Stuff

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Better Human

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