Beating the Busyness Trap
How to move from being a busy fool to being a productive sage
Introduction
Have you ever had a day full of back-to-back meetings and got to the end of it and felt like you had achieved absolutely nothing?
Has someone at work asked you how you are, and you default to saying ‘busy’?
Business is often worn as a badge of honour.
Being busy means that you are important. You’re needed here, there and everywhere. The world cannot function unless you are running from meeting to meeting, email to email.
But really, you get stuck in an endless cycle of never really making meaningful progress.
George Mack refers to this as ‘The Busy Trap’.
Being busy today means that you will be busy tomorrow and the day after that. Ad infinitum.
You don’t allow yourself to slow down, assess, reflect and recalibrate.
Are You Productive or Just Busy?
One of my favourite quotes is from Ca Newport’s book, ‘Deep Work’:
“Busyness as a proxy for productivity”.
This means running around, feeling like you are doing a lot, in an attempt to feel productive. This can look like:
Having a calendar jam-packed with meetings.
Travelling here, there and everywhere.
Constantly replying to emails and IM’s as soon as you receive them.
These actions signal to others that you are doing your job, but really, it is just pseudo-productivity.
It’s quantity over quality.
It’s self-deluding behaviour. How can you not be doing a good job when you are this busy?
The Origins of Productivity
The concept of productivity originated during the Industrial Revolution, when machines began replacing humans on factory assembly lines.
Optimising the efficiency and flow of these machines allowed the factory owners to produce more output in less time. This was productivity. This makes sense.
The problem is transferring this concept onto the modern-day knowledge worker.
Knowledge workers, like you and I, aren’t machines. The outputs that we produce typically aren’t physical, it’s information.
The generation, transfer or processing of information cannot be treated the same as an assembly line in a factory.
The Origins of BusYness
Whilst the origins of productivity are well known, the origins of busyness that I am presenting are more subjective and a matter of my own opinions and experiences.
For me, it happened when I transitioned from a doer to a thinker. I started my career as an Engineer with a defined workload. I would create a design or document, close off the task and move on to the next one.
It was simple and created a sense of satisfaction when I had created something and could clearly see that I had completed the task.
The difficulty came when I moved into leadership and management positions.
All of a sudden, I no longer created things.
I sent emails, went to more meetings, and chased other people for work.
Things became less tangible, and I struggled for a long time with knowing if I was actually doing any ‘real work’.
So, to make myself feel better, I began to have more meetings, send more emails, and reply to IM’s quicker. It gave me a sense of being productive.
I expect this is the same experience for other people who move from doers to thinkers (managers, leaders, etc.). Their contributions become less definable (and physical), and this creates a sense of unease.
How to Escape the Trap
The best way of escaping the busyness trap is to gain clarity on what is important in your role or business.
Ask yourself:
What are you there to do?
What problems are you solving?
What activities do you do that truly move the needle (80/20 principle)?
Once you have clarity on these, you then need to ensure you prioritise them.
You can then try to remove activities that only make you look busy.
This can include saying “no” to meetings that don’t really need you.
Not having knee-jerk reactions and replying to emails and IM’s as soon as you receive them.
Once you prioritise and declutter your diary, you will need to be comfortable with just having dedicated time to think. You will have to fight the urge to fill up the gaps in your calendar with other busy work.
This time should be used to reflect on what you have been doing and what you need to do. Ultimately, this time is to prevent you from falling back into the Busyness Trap.
