When serving as CEO of Microsoft, Bill Gates had a schedule so jam-packed that it was a point of pride. A proxy for his seriousness. He’d send emails to employees at 2:00 a.m. and pack his calendar to the minute. He believed being constantly busy and working hard was the only way to achieve greatness.
But a peek into Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett’s daybook changed this forever. “I had every minute packed, and I thought that was the only way you could do things,” Gates told journalist Charlie Rose in 2017. “I remember Warren showing me his calendar… he [still] has days that there’s nothing on it.”
Buffett’s sparser schedule taught Gates that true control does not come from filling every single minute of it. It comes from right time management. “I can buy anything I want, basically, but I can’t buy time,” Buffett said.
Are You Using a Spoon?
In business, this frantic, minute-by-minute activity is like carrying water with a spoon. No matter how hard you work, you won’t make enough progress that’s worthy of the time spent. In our professional lives, this happens all the time in things like:
- Drowning in Manual Data Entry: When every new lead, every call, and every meeting requires you to manually input data into spreadsheets, you’re not selling—you’re administrating. This is a classic spoon activity.
- A Guessing Game of Follow-Up: Without a clear system, you waste valuable energy on low-value prospects, chasing down leads with a gut feeling instead of a data-driven strategy.
- Being a Human Bottleneck: When information is siloed in your inbox or on your personal desktop, you become the chokepoint for your entire team, creating friction and slowing down every process.
Peter Drucker once famously said, “Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.” The real challenge isn’t to get better at carrying water with a spoon; it’s finding out that you need a bucket. You need to change your tools.
The Power of the Bucket
In business, the “bucket” is both tools and strategies that automate tedious tasks. They free you to focus on high-impact work where humans can shine and cannot be done by any robots or AI tool yet. A powerful example here is having a good Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
The data shows that businesses that adopt a CRM system see, on average, a 29% increase in sales, a 34% improvement in sales productivity, and a 42% increase in accurate sales forecasts. It’s no wonder that a Nucleus Research report found that CRM offers an average return on investment of $8.71 for every dollar spent. That is no small gain.
Making the Transition
Moving from a spoon to a bucket requires a strategic shift in mindset, just as Gates did when he saw Buffett’s calendar.
- Conduct a Process Audit: Map out your typical week. Identify every repetitive, manual task and ask yourself, “Could a machine handle this?”
- Embrace Automation: Look for tools that automate data entry, schedule follow-ups, and even score leads for you. Let technology handle the grunt work so you can focus on what a machine can’t: building genuine relationships.
- Leverage Data: Stop making decisions based on gut feelings. Use the data your new tools provide to identify your most effective channels, your most valuable prospects, and the true health of your sales pipeline.
In 2021, the Wall Street Journal published an article based on a major study. The article was provocatively titled “How Being More Productive Starts With Doing Nothing.” In essence, the article said it has been proven that the more you create a life that has less chaos, the more you create space for my genius to show up. By putting down the spoon and picking up the bucket, you’re not just moving more water—you’re changing the game, allowing yourself to achieve business growth with leverage instead of just labor.
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Sept. 2025
