I was in a strategy workshop with a startup recently who said the rebuttal they get the most from potential customers is this: “We’re just too busy to save time right now.”

It’s the sort of phrase people say with the kind of practiced certainty that implies it’s both rational and unchangeable. But the more I hear it, the more I’ve come to understand it has almost nothing to do with calendars, or bandwidth, or the stress of competing priorities. It’s not even really about the solution on offer.

What it really signals is a deeper kind of misalignment—one that has everything to do with how people allocate their attention, protect their teams, and navigate risk in an environment where every request feels like an interruption. (And, of course, this has become exponentially worse with generative AI.)

"Too busy to save time” isn’t actually a scheduling problem, or even a time problem. It’s a recognition problem. A risk problem. A clarity problem. And when you begin to see it that way, everything shifts.

The Defensive Posture of Modern Leadership

This will come as no surprise to anyone, but inside most organizations—industrial, healthcare, logistics, finance, you name it—leaders (myself included) live in a state of managed overwhelm. They are running plants, solving operational issues, handling personnel questions, fielding customer demands, and managing a political ecosystem inside their own walls. Attention is a scarce resource, guarded closely, and every new idea, every pitch, every initiative lands first as a disruption—and an unwelcome one at that.

Even when a solution is good—even when it would genuinely save time or money or capacity—it still arrives as one more thing they have to process. And unless it maps precisely onto the problem occupying their mind in that exact moment, it gets dismissed. Not necessarily because they’re disinterested, either, but because they’re overloaded. Even if they don't quite know what they're doing, they're not evaluating opportunities because they're defending their attention, which feels like it's suddenly being attacked.

The Burden of Ambiguity

What often goes unnoticed is how much interpretive labor we expect people to do when we present them with generalities. I learned this first in graduate school, where Chekhov’s “show don’t tell” advice factored into every workshop I attended, and then later in business, where the advice also holds true.

A vague message forces the listener to close the gap themselves—to imagine how it applies, where it fits, whether it’s worth the organizational lift. It asks them to convert ambiguity into meaning, and that translation is risky. It pulls from their already-depleted cognitive pool and creates the possibility they’ll make the wrong assumption and, ultimately, make the wrong choice. So they retreat behind the politest, safest shield available:

“We’re too busy right now.”

Which is really just a way of saying: I don’t see myself in what you’re telling me, and I can’t afford to figure it out for you. The problem, then, isn’t the busyness. It’s that the message required the buyer to carry the risk.

When Recognition Happens Instead

Every strategist, every salesperson, and every executive has witnessed the opposite moment as well—the instant when a message lands with such clarity that the person across the table visibly changes. Their posture eases. Their eyes move toward you, not away. Their attention stops bracing and starts leaning in.

It’s subtle, but unmistakable. And it’s the moment the message stops feeling like an interruption and starts feeling like an answer. That shift doesn’t happen because someone suddenly found extra time in their week. It happens because the message reflected their world back to them—their constraints, their aspirations, their priorities. You said something that carried the risk for them rather than assigning it to them. General messages leave everyone out. But specific messages bring the right people in.

A message designed for an “average buyer” is a message designed for no one—and in the corporate world, where political capital and internal credibility are always at stake, no one is going to champion a solution they cannot articulate cleanly to their own teams.

Which is why, when someone says they’re too busy to save time, I no longer hear a statement about workload. I hear a statement about clarity. About recognition. About risk.

People aren’t too busy to save time. They’re too busy to decipher messages that weren’t written with their world in mind, too busy to shoulder the uncertainty of ideas that ask them to do the interpretive work themselves.

When the message is clear—when it reflects their reality, names their problem precisely, and carries the risk for them—time has a way of reappearing. Attention shifts. Defensiveness softens. Curiosity takes its place.

And the phrase disappears entirely.