By Joff Outlaw & Brad Marshall
Think about the last meeting you had. There’s a good chance it started with the following exchange:
“How are you, busy?”
“Yes, flat out! You?”
“Yeah, really busy, it’s that time of year!”
The problem is that it’s always ‘that time of year’. Despite the proliferation of digital tools that promised to supercharge our productivity, we’re busier than ever. And busyness has become a status symbol. Long hours and overflowing schedules are often worn as badges of honour, and worse still, the busiest employees are often rewarded.
Busyness, however, is a masquerade for productivity. In fact, they are opposites:
> Busyness is reactive, productivity is proactive
> Busyness is about effort, productivity is about outcomes
> Busy people fill their time, productive people prioritise their time.
The central argument in our recently published Busy Idiots is that busyness is the greatest, yet still unspoken issue in the modern workplace.
And, it’s not your fault. The average person checks their smartphone over 85 times per day, resulting in constant interruptions and fragmented focus. Instead of progressing on meaningful tasks, we find ourselves reacting to notifications, emails, and other forms of digital ‘urgency’.
Our brains are hardwired to respond to these distractions; dopamine-driven reward systems encourage us to keep checking for new messages, updates, and likes. This constant engagement with devices feeds our need for stimulation but can easily spiral into a kind of screen addiction that erodes deeper productivity.
If it’s not your phone stealing your attention, it might be your boss. It can be hard to manage your time, if your ‘busy boss’ is pulling you from pillar to post. The truth is that most people don’t leave their company, they leave their boss. However, most employees have more power than they think; leadership is earned not appointed.
There are tips and tricks in the book to defend your time so that you can focus on deep work and avoid busy traps. One way is to build your circle of influence. In the same way you don’t want to be in the wrong crowd at school (or maybe you did!) you don’t want to be stuck working with a busy boss. Find the leaders you respect, learn from them and proactively seek opportunities to work with them. If you work for a smaller company, this might not be possible. In this situation, the Think Straight, Talk Straight Framework in the book will help you ladder up to business problems, avoid conflict and get back to your priority tasks.
Finally, no person is an island and we can’t go it alone. Yet, oftentimes teams forgo the basics. They enter projects without a clear understanding of each person’s responsibilities and strengths. Worse still, they afford no time to bond. Work doesn’t have to be miserable and there should always be time for some fun on the company clock. It’s too late to bond, once the going gets tough on a project. In the book, we provide a template to create a ‘team pact’, which helps teams think about the hard stuff (who is responsible for what?) and the soft stuff (what are our shared goals?).
Did you have to call us idiots?
Well, it takes one to know one. Earlier in our careers, we wasted years being busy idiots and it’s not a nice feeling. Your soul knows the difference between meaningful deep work and flying by the seat of your pants. Busy idiots is a call to arms to stop praising busyness in the workplace – it’s bad for employees and it’s bad for business.
Find out more at busyidiots.net.
Read More
See Author Profile
