Productively Ineffective: How Being Busy Is Holding Us Back
If I had a dollar for every time I asked someone “How are you doing?” and they responded with, “Busy, busy…so busy…” I’d have enough money to retire from the workplace and encounter that familiar exchange far less. It’s a replacement script for an actual conversation. We wear our busyness like it’s a badge of honor when instead we should wear it as a big warning label that says, “Hey man, check this out: I’m disorganized!” I’m not talking about the occasional period of elevated workload or brief duration when we have to put in long hours, but about the consistent, frantic, ill-defined busyness that seems to beset so many workplaces, teams, and individuals. It overtakes us from time to time. Many of us claim to be “so busy!”, but with very little to show for it at the end of each day. We cannot track our progress, our goals are ill-defined, and we have little to no roadmap on how we plan to accomplish our work. We measure success by the fact that we still have a job, the phone is not ringing off the hook with complaints, and our company is still in business. These are poor metrics to measure success or progress.
The Knowledge Economy
In prior decades, the output and grading of production, busyness, and success were a bit more easily measured: so many machined pieces built per hour, so many packages delivered per day, so many yards of concrete poured in place. All of those tasks still get done, but by a much smaller segment of the workforce. The shift has occurred all around us, across all industries, to an increasingly administrative, knowledge-based economy. Unfortunately, much of the administrative class workforce spends an obscene amount of time each workweek engaged in non-measurable, nearly valueless uses of time. A prime example of this is our bizarre fascination with emails. Not well-crafted and informed communications which provide clarity, direction, and information, but instead reactionary, short written blurbs that we pretend are actually work being accomplished.
Most of us have still not adjusted to a knowledge work economy and this is revealed by our habits. We intrinsically desire to “see” something in a visible form that we created. “Look! I created an email!” We have anxiety about all the “unread” emails in our inbox (we talk about these things as if they were real instead of binary codes of 1s and 0s) as if we could reach a state of blissful “work nirvana” if the emails would just stop. We turn ourselves into human network routers, thinking that addressing paperwork, sending emails, or documenting processes is actually the work. But those efforts all miss the point of the knowledge economy. Author Seth Godin has correctly observed the following:
The job of workers in the knowledge economy boils down to one thing — to make decisions.
Who has time to plan when we are so busy? Who has time to tackle the work of making those decisions? Below are some thoughts about the impact of this false busyness that is so prevalent in our workplaces and lives, as well as some tactics to combat it and keep it at bay. If we can change our habits, we can change our outcomes, freeing us to actually make decisions and do work that matters.
Impacts Of “Busyness”
Losing A Competitive Edge
In any workplace, but especially in a knowledge economy, our attention and organization are our competitive advantage. A few examples:
- You’re paying attention so you pick up on what your customer is truly saying (or what they are not saying) and your tailor your sales proposal to win the job and the relationship.
- You’re organized and focused, so you are able to consistently deliver on your goals and objectives, building a reputation that provides you repeat business.
- Your level of research and detailed analysis of a problem is by far the best the client has seen of late, impressing them and starting an ongoing relationship.
Much of the world is populated by sloppiness, sloth, and distraction. It takes very little additional effort to stand out in the crowd. If you can master your own attention, hone your focus, and strengthen your critical thinking skills you are akin to a velociraptor inhabiting a competitive field populated by slow-moving sheep. It’s no longer a competition.
Ineffective Living
Like the distracted character of the White Rabbit in “Alice In Wonderland”, we are surrounded by folks that always seem to be up against a looming deadline and have insanely busy lives but remain both inefficient and ineffective. We easily succumb to that temptation of frenetic, spasmodic energy as well. We race through our workdays (and into our evenings) with a jostled mind, a loose plan (at best), and a willingness to respond immediately to whatever is in front of our face (aka what someone else has decided we should pay attention to). We think that we are being “productive” because we are being so efficient with our time; tackling eight random tasks at once and clicking off items from our mental to-do list. But productivity for output’s sake can be a false goal, making us efficient in inconsequential areas. To borrow from Jim Rohn: we get really good at majoring in minor things.
If we had to choose between being efficient or being effective, choose to be effective. Efficiency has to do primarily with optimization of processes; effectiveness focuses on actually accomplishing our goals. What we forget is how much work can actually be effectively accomplished if distractions are eliminated and a schedule is followed. We incorrectly approach our work or activities as “just something we do” instead of a craft which needs to be studied and practiced. We spend too much time being busy and working “in” our work, instead of methodically working “on” our work.
Tactics
Below are several foundational areas which can be tackled initially to start clawing one’s way out of a habit of “busyness” and towards habits of purpose and planning.
Set Priorities
Even in professional workplaces, you will most likely need to set priorities for yourself as its equally likely that your employer or supervisor cannot lucidly communicate what are the actual priorities for your position or work. Many of them are so busy, they haven’t actually spent much time forecasting a vision for your position. Remember: all work is self-directed. We always claim that we want our bosses, supervisors, or employers to “just tell me what to do!”, but it’s unlikely that they have a much better idea about your work than you do, and telling you exactly what to do is not why they hired you. (We’ve written before about why they hired you.) Setting priorities in your work will often be up to you, particularly in the day-to-day execution of that work. It’s the unwritten expectation of many organizations and “managers” that you will manage yourself. Because you should be motivated. Because you should be learning every day. Because you’re an adult. Prepare accordingly.
Say No
Once priorities are set, it becomes easier to say “No” to requests, invites, and new obligations. Does this request, offer, invite, obligation further or hinder my established priorities? Does it help me become the person I am attempting to be? Author Darius Foroux makes an excellent point in his recent article about the power of saying “No.”, in order to get the more important things accomplished in your life:
“What matters is this: If you keep saying yes, you’re living someone else’s life.”
We should be actively saying “No.” to a lot of potential things in our lives, in order to accomplish our goals and priorities with increasing competency and mastery. In order to say “Yes” to the priorities, life, and the person we are striving to be, we need to say “No” to a lot of things that would otherwise keep us efficiently “busy”.
Forecast and Planning
Start looking down the road, planning the ending of the work even at the start of it. What does good look like? What does GREAT look like? Get as specific as possible at the time, but don’t be overly hung up on the fact if your rough draft idea is a bit loose, keep refining as you go and dialing it in. Try to do 50% of what you are attempting to accomplish now, but do it really well. Our workplaces and lives will keep giving us more, more, MORE until we say STOP. It is up to us to insist on those limits; limits which actually free up our attention and energy to be targeted to predetermined priorities. We’ve written before about the power of lists and schedules to clear up mental space and keep us on track towards our goals. Forecasting our desired end results and systematically, habitually planning will give us a good base to build upon as we aim at doing work that matters.
We need to approach our work and priorities as if they have value (because they do) and make sure that we are legitimately preparing ourselves to engage and accomplish meaningful things. We should be wary of the “busyness trap” and the lure of “false productivity”. Just because our time is filled up doesn’t mean it’s being used profitably. Achieving that profitable outcome is a decision we must repeatedly make.
Moving Forward:
Do you find yourself typically distracted or focused?
Are you able to eliminate the response “I’m so busy…” from your vocabulary?
Originally published at fjwriting.com on November 13, 2018.
