Too busy being busy to be effective? You’re in good company!

What I observe

It’s not uncommon when I’m delivering training nowadays for delegates to arrive late as they were dealing with one last issue, to bring their laptops believing they can continue both their normal job whilst participating in training, to not stretch their legs during breaks because they are ‘catching up on emails’, to not use lunch breaks for the same reason and to finish a session feeling they now have a day of work to catch up on. That is really not good on so many levels.

Outside the training arena, I see the same happening with day-to-day work and workplace meetings. Clients solving the same problem for the nth time in the year, employees spending hours on a piece of work only to find they hadn’t really understood the brief or the brief had changed and they missed the memo…

Addressing the busyness problem

Luckily, I was blessed with lots of common sense so, if I recognise this as a problem, I need to engage brain, dig into 30+ years of workplace experience and come up with a few solutions that you may well ignore as you are too busy to do anything about being busy!

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Across my career I’ve always come across some people busy being busy and there will always be those people who love being seen as busy, but across the last few years this has grown into an epidemic of busyness. The problem is that it’s not good for individuals and it’s not good for employers.

The value of thinking

In my very first job, 35 years ago, I remember knocking on the door of a senior manager, but my knock went unanswered. I then went to open the door in order to leave some papers on his desk, but the door wouldn’t budge. His PA (yes, everyone had their own PA’s in those days) chose that moment to pop her head up from her work station and said ‘he always lies down on the floor by the door to stop people coming in when he’s thinking’. So I left and came back later.

It was very strange, but to this day I’ve never undervalued thinking time. I’ll also never berate someone if they’re staring into space and look as though they are doing nothing (lessons on trust another time I promise!). I also ensure that I carve out my own thinking time as it’s amazing what ideas suddenly emerge when you clear your head of all the clutter and busyness.

Before we get into any tips and guidance, let’s do a little self-assessment…

A self-assessment to understand the extent of YOUR problem with busyness

Score each answer out of 10 – 1 is not a problem, 10 is wow do I have a problem!

1. Do you always feel busy?
2. Do you feel you have no time for anything?
3. Do you feel you are always catching up?
4. Do you feel overwhelmed with emails, messages, texts etc?
5. Do you feel a need to be visibly busy?
   • If yes, who created this need to be visibly busy, you yourself or your manager? (be really honest here)
6. Is it you rather than your manager/employer who creates much of this tail chasing busy-ness? (this would be the case if you don’t organise your time well, micro manage, make small errors, fail to ask enough questions etc)
7. Does busy being busy for you result in a lot of dropped balls, late attendance at meetings, stress at weekends, avoidable over time, cancelled training sessions and endless little mistakes or errors?
8. Do you despair at finding a way to be less busy?
9. Does busy being busy affect your physical and/or mental health?
10. Do you blame others for how busy you are?

With a maximum score of 100, how did you do?

Top tips to deal with our own busyness

I’m not sure how you will have fared if you honestly answered my questions, but if you’re still reading, here are some top tips from my wiser self (remembering that I am no saint either) on dealing with busyness:

1. Walk!

I don’t walk with ear buds in. I avoid busy places when I walk. I walk listening to the wind, the birds, the noises around me. Nature, if you’re lucky enough to have some near you, is especially good for creating space in our heads for thinking but the key is to not to force thinking, just let thoughts emerge. This means:

1) I need to get off my chair and go outside.

2) I benefit most when I walk on my own.

3) I do not walk with my phone in hand/pocket (and buds in ears).

2. Try to do one thing each day that is pro-active rather than reactive

For example, I take the time to reflect on re-occurring problems, to learn something new, to hear new ideas or opinions different to my own, to sort something that wasn’t even on my to do list yet. In fact, what I am doing today, right here and now, is more for my benefit than yours 😊 I’m exploring my thoughts as I write/speak.

3. I consider a ‘busy being busy’ day a failed day

Failed is a strong word, but I stick by it, a day that was not effective. I don’t pride myself on knowing the whole world thought I was indispensable. I would prefer to take pride in a job really well done, relationships built, having impact, enjoying the challenges…

4. I continually remind myself of a really irritating quote

It’s been stuck in my head since I first read it decades ago ‘if you always do what you’ve always done, you will always get what you’ve always got’. If we want something to be different, we can’t wait for someone else to do something about it, changing things is on us.

5. I value my resilience

If one thing I try in order to reduce busyness fails, then I try something different and then something different again. I never stop trying to find a solution. The day I do that is the day I consider I have failed. Resilience is about getting back up. I will not give in to this nonsense mantra of we are all busy and it always has to be that way.

Top tips for dealing with organisational busyness

For the decision makers

Much of our busy-ness, in my experience, comes from doing things the slow way, the wrong way or doing them multiple times as we loused up or failed to address the real problem first time around. None of us are asking enough questions, checking our knowledge or information is correct, checking in with others to ensure we are on the right track, learning by watching and working with others who have different skill sets to our own. Remote working has effectively killed off our ability to have the millions of 30 second conversations that I had across the first 3 decades of my career. These micro conversations always (mostly) ensured I was pointed in the right direction, focused on the right things, learning.

To reduce busy-ness for everyone we need to create a workplace culture (every single employee and director being responsible for this) that:

The headline stuff

• Has and upholds crystal clear professional standards (these can/will be different for each organisation) – please don’t ignore the ‘upholds’ part of this sentence!
• Builds in thinking time and creates a culture of reflection, root cause/problem identification, problem solving, innovation, and critical thinking.
• Values the social connections at work as much as the task list each person has, as its these social connections that help us work effectively. No more silos and no more ‘independent islands’ ie people who work on their own.

Digging in to the detail…

• Accepts it’s okay to make a mistake as long as we own it and learn from it – you might know this as a fail-safe culture.
• Demands adult responsible, accountable behaviours in the workplace – see it, own it, do it (rather than walk around the box on the stairs that isn’t your responsibility then shrug your shoulders like it’s not your fault when someone else trips over it) and also, that quickly removes from the team those who choose not to be accountable because accountability, at the end of the day, is always a personal choice.
• Doesn’t encourage (or allow) any manager or team member to treat anyone else like a child who needs constant monitoring, handholding, mothering, rescuing or special treatment (otherwise they will never learn to be accountable).

Remembering that we all need training and opportunities to develop

• Trains in/develops effective communication skills including assertiveness, conflict management, questioning and listening. Yes… directors often need these skills as much as the most junior person you employ!
• Trains in/develops – self-confidence, self-esteem, resilience, stress management, emotional intelligence.
• Trains in/develops – accountability, adaptability, problem solving.

So now I’m going to go for a walk, in the rain as it’s the UK, and then next week, I’m going to use this blueprint with my own team to see what results we can get across the next 12 months. A little less busyness would be a win/win for everyone.

Luckily for us we deliver training in all these topics, and we write policies and papers on professional standards so we’re at the starting point and ready for the gun to go off. Job 1, therefore, is to identify who needs what training and get that booked in and woe betide any employee who says they are too busy to attend 😊