Intentional Work vs Hard Work: What Actually Drives Business Growth
By Oliver Summers | Summers Performance Management
We live in a world that celebrates busyness. Long hours, packed calendars, back-to-back meetings — these have become the unofficial badges of the committed entrepreneur. If you're not exhausted, are you even trying?
But here's what the science actually tells us: hard work and productive work are not the same thing. And for the vast majority of business owners, that distinction is the difference between years of effort that compounds into something meaningful, and years of effort that simply keeps you busy.
This is something I work on with entrepreneurs and small business owners every single day through Summers Performance Management. And it is, without question, one of the most important shifts a business owner can make.
The Busyness Illusion
In 2012, a McKinsey Global Institute study found that the average knowledge worker spends more than 60% of their working week on activities like electronic communication, administrative tasks, and information searching — work that feels productive but generates very little actual output or business growth.
Research by Asana found that 60% of knowledge workers' time is spent on coordination tasks Asana — the meetings, the emails, the updates — rather than the work that actually moves things forward.
For entrepreneurs, this problem is amplified. There is no manager telling you what to prioritise. No structure forcing you to focus. You are entirely responsible for deciding where your energy goes each day. And without that clarity, the default is to stay busy, because busy feels safe. Busy feels like progress.
It isn't.
What High Performance Research Actually Shows
Research published in a major meta-analytic review defines effort as capturing three things: what employees work on, how hard they work, and how long they persist in that work — and found that how workers allocate effort between relevant and irrelevant activities is critical to performance. Sage Journals
Read that again. It isn't just how hard you work. It's what you work on.
Cal Newport, computer science professor at Georgetown University and author of Deep Work, puts it plainly: to produce at your peak level, you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Wharton School Newport calls the opposite of this "shallow work" — non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted, that tend not to create new value. Todoist
The uncomfortable truth for most business owners is that the majority of their day is spent in shallow work. And shallow work, no matter how much of it you do, does not build a business.
The Science of Attention and Why It Matters for Entrepreneurs
One of the most important concepts in performance research is what University of Minnesota professor Sophie Leroy identified as "attention residue." When you switch from task A to task B, your attention doesn't follow immediately — a residue of it remains stuck on the original task, and people experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance. Welcome to the Jungle
For entrepreneurs who are constantly jumping between roles — sales, operations, marketing, finance, client delivery — this is a significant performance drain. Every switch costs you cognitive capacity. Every interruption leaves a residue. By the time you sit down to do the work that actually matters, you are already operating at a fraction of your capacity.
Anders Ericsson, professor of psychology, found that the difference between expert performers and average adults was the product of deliberate effort to improve performance — and that deliberate practice cannot exist alongside distraction. It requires complete concentration. Welcome to the Jungle
High performers in business are not operating differently in terms of hours. They are operating differently in terms of intention.
Intention: The Real Differentiator
Being intentional means knowing — with clarity — which activities in your business actually drive revenue, growth, and development. And then protecting time for those activities above everything else.
Research consistently shows that organisations with high engagement are significantly more productive and profitable than minimally engaged ones — and one of the key drivers of engagement is working on tasks that feel meaningful and directional. ActivTrak
For a business owner, engagement with your own work comes from alignment — when what you spend your time on matches what you know needs to happen to grow. When that alignment breaks down, when your days are filled with reactive tasks and low-value activity, motivation drops, progress stalls, and the work starts to feel heavy.
This is not a discipline problem. It is a clarity problem.
Relentlessness Is Not Intensity — It's Consistency
There is a version of relentlessness that burns people out. It looks like 14-hour days, sacrificed weekends, and the constant feeling that you should be doing more. This version does not build high performance businesses. It builds exhausted ones.
The research tells a different story about what relentlessness actually means.
Studies show that working hours alone do not have a significant association with work productivity when taking work engagement into account. PubMed Central The hours matter far less than the quality of attention and intention you bring to them.
True relentlessness, in the context of high performance, is the commitment to showing up to the right things consistently — week after week, regardless of motivation, energy levels, or external pressure. It is building a standard and holding it. Not chasing great days, but building great weeks.
Newport describes this principle in the context of peak performers: even short, consistent periods of deep work — say 90 minutes in the morning — can produce transformative results over time. Motivane
Compound that over weeks, months, and years, and the gap between the intentional entrepreneur and the busy one becomes enormous.
What This Looks Like in Practice
At Summers Performance Management, the work I do with business owners consistently comes back to three questions:
What are the activities in your business that actually move the needle? Not the tasks that feel urgent. Not the ones that fill your inbox. The ones that, if done consistently and well, grow your revenue, deepen your client relationships, and develop you as a leader.
Are those activities getting your best time and energy? Not the leftovers at the end of a long day. Your peak hours. Your sharpest focus.
Are you showing up to them consistently enough to compound? One good week is not the goal. The goal is building a structure that produces good weeks reliably — regardless of how you feel on any given Monday morning.
This is the shift. Not working more. Working on the right things, intentionally, relentlessly, week after week.
The Standard
Hard work has always mattered. It always will. But hard work is only as valuable as the direction it's pointed in.
The entrepreneurs who build something meaningful are not the ones who work the longest hours. They are the ones who are ruthlessly clear on what deserves their energy — and who protect that clarity every single week.
Intentional. Relentless. Consistent.
That is the standard of high performance business.
Oliver Summers is a high performance coach and the founder of Summers Performance Management, working with entrepreneurs and small business owners to close the gap between their potential and their results.
