Edit: This is still good stuff.
Originally posted November 9, 2010 on AIXchange
Some time ago I read two articles that got me thinking about the same thing: the difference between being busy and getting things done.
How are you living your day-to-day life? Are you busy running around from one task to another without thinking about what you’re doing? Are you actively looking for ways to automate or eliminate tasks? Are you stressed out?
The author of this piece explains why she stopped working with “busy” people. “It took me a while to realize that there’s a big difference between someone who feels busy and someone who has a lot going on in their business. Busy, my friends, is a cop-out. It’s a euphemism for everything from ‘I’m frantic with deadlines’ to ‘I just don’t wanna’ to ‘I feel bamboozled as to what to do next so I’m checking Twitter obsessively to tell people I’m busy.'”
How are you at prioritizing, making lists and systematically attacking the items that need to be completed? Are you working on goals and are the things you do each day helping you to reach those goals?
I understand we all have things that we need to get done, and many of them need to get done NOW, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we must become so stressed, so busy, that we lose perspective on what we’re actually trying to accomplish. We can’t get so busy handling service requests, for instance, that we lose sight of the reality that some tasks can be delegated to others.
I can hear you thinking: “But Rob, there have been cutbacks, and now I’m doing the job that two or three people did before.” This is all the more reason to seek assistance. Early in my career, senior staff members would rely on junior staff members to handle the routine requests, which helped to free up senior staff to create simple but highly useful tools like scripts and self-help portals. How much better is it to spend a bit of time setting up a tool that people can use to help themselves?
Always stop and ask yourself: Is this task really important for me to tackle? Can someone else do it? Can we teach someone to do it themselves? Can we give them better tools to help them do their job?
As is noted in this article on “the cult of the busy,” “By appearing busy, people bother them less, and simultaneously believe they’re doing well at their job. It’s quite a trick. The person who gets a job done in one hour will seem less busy than the guy who can only do it in five. How busy a person seems is not necessarily indicative of the quality of their results. Someone who is better at something might very well seem less busy, because they are more effective. Results matter more than the time spent to achieve them. People who are always busy are time poor. They have a time shortage. They have time debt. They are either trying to do too much, or they aren’t doing what they’re doing very well. [They’re either ineffective with their time or they] don’t know what they’re trying to effect, so they scramble away at trying to optimize for everything, which leads to optimizing nothing.”
So are you busy? Are you effective? What do you plan to do about it?