You can be busy all day and still feel like nothing important happened.
Before starting Chief of Chaos, I spent years in solution sales—working with and inside Fortune 500 organizations. From the outside, it looked like high performance. Calendars packed. KPIs tracked. Dashboards lit up. And yet, behind all that busyness, there was a quiet frustration I couldn’t ignore: no one felt like they were actually getting anywhere.
That tension followed me. It seeped into my own expectations of what work should look like. I began equating productivity with worth. If I wasn’t moving, building, optimizing—I felt like I was falling behind.
Eventually, I realized: the trap wasn’t mine alone. It was systemic. And I didn’t want to carry it with me anymore.
The Corporate Productivity Trap
I saw it everywhere: brilliant people operating at full capacity, chasing outcomes that weren’t always tied to impact. There was always another initiative, another meeting, another push for growth. And yet, clarity was rare. Energy was thin. And meaning—the kind that sustains people—was missing.
Even the clients I worked with, some of the most successful companies in the world, often suffered from an inability to slow down long enough to ask: Why are we doing this? Is it working? Is it worth it?
Why I Left
When Matt Frary and I started Chief of Chaos, it wasn’t just to build a company. It was to build a different relationship to work.
I didn’t want a culture of optimized motion. I wanted a place obsessed with adding value—and meaning.
The Pivot: From Output to Orientation
Once I stepped out of the old system, I started asking myself different questions:
- Am I creating value—or just activity?
- Does this pace feel like me—or like a corporate echo I’m still repeating?
- What’s the actual cost of my efficiency?
I realized I’d been trained to manage work, not design a life.
So I flipped the script. I stopped measuring productivity in hours or tasks, and started measuring it in clarity, alignment, and momentum that actually feels good.
Redefining “Done”
At Chief of Chaos, our culture is still forming. We’re small. We’re young. But we’re intentional. And it starts with how I define “done”:
- Done is not a finished deck—it’s an idea that lands.
- Done is not an empty inbox—it’s a client who feels seen.
- Done is not just output—it’s outcome, with heart behind it.
I still believe in ambition. I just no longer believe that busyness is the path to it.
Mirror Moment
Where in your work are you performing productivity instead of pursuing value?
What would it look like to build something from stillness, not stress?
Thanks for reading.
More signal, less noise.
— Brandon
