It is becoming a bit of a cliche, but when two professional people meet the answer to 'How are you doing?' is more often than not “Busy, so very busy” - potentially followed by some description of just how terrible their plight is.
It is clear we are getting some sense of importance out of showing off just how overworked we are. We sometimes go as far as defend the situation as referring to it as 'normal', or 'just the way the world works these days'.
But is our perception of how busy we are correct and is this indeed the best way for the world to work?
Joshua Becker goes as far as calling busyness a form of laziness. I would add it's a form of procrastination: we are filling up our time with unimportant things to avoid getting to those things that are truly important.
“Those who are wise won't be busy, and those who are too busy can't be wise.” -- Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living
Efficient vs effective
People often get confused about the difference between being efficient and being effective. I think it helps to start with the definitions:
The essential difference is: Being effective is about doing the right things (keeping your goals in mind), while being efficient is about doing things right.The ideal situation is to combine high effectiveness, selecting those tasks that are going to get you to your goal (see also the Pareto effect) and doing the task in an efficient way (one method that can help is the below mentioned Parkinson's law). See the different quadrants in below diagram.
Are you doing something that is important, that is going to help you attain your goals? Repeat this question throughout the day. If not you are just being busy.
“It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?” -- Henry David Thoreau
Being effective with Pareto
As we discussed in my first article on priority management, the Pareto Principle states that “roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.”
In that article, the emphasis was on selecting those tasks that make up that 20% of causes that give you 80% of the effects for our priority list.
The next step towards effectiveness, is using the Pareto Principle to simply eliminate those tasks, customers and even people from your life that are not contributing to your goals or might even keep you away from them.
When it comes to tasks, you should concentrate on the tasks that are important, that are part of your core responsibilities. There will of course be tasks that are not specifically important but are meant to be done. You can see them as supporting tasks. The best way to deal with them is simply ... outsource them.
Have a look at the customers you spend your time on (no matter if you have your own enterprise or you work for a company). You will probably find that a small group of them are responsible for the vast majority of the sales, … You will no doubt also find that there is a large group of them that are not contributing for much of your number but are responsible for the majority of your problems. Once you are aware of it, you'll be motivated to get rid of them.
And finally, people. As Jim Rohn said, you are the average (or reflection) of the 5 people you spend the most of your time with. These are the 20% of the people you spend time with, which have 80% or more of the effect on who you are (or are perceived) as a person. So being effective in life, requires you to have a long, honest and unbiased look at the people around you. Are they supportive, do they help you grow? If not, you might consider either reducing the time you are sharing with those people, or leave them out of your life all together.
“Surround yourself with those conducive to you being your highest self.” -- A.D. Posey
Increase you efficiency using Parkinson's Law
I still remember one specific exam in the last year at university, the subject was 'Benchmarking for computational systems' or something similar to that. I had been working like mad to finalise my dissertation and ran to the department to hand it in just in time before the deadline at noon. The next day I had the exam and not only had I not attended a single session of this most interesting of subjects, I had not read a letter of the courseware (actually I was already pretty proud that I even had a copy).
So with no time to waste I started reading like a madman. You can image there was no time to dwell on anything in detail, my only objective was to know what all the concepts in the course meant and to be able to explain enough during the oral examination to give the impression I knew what I was talking about. I read 7 of the 8 chapters.
My fellow students were all waiting outside the examination room and as is typical everybody is busy adding to the already strained nerves or even casting doubt in everybody's mind. I came in super relax and when I mentioned I hadn't read the last chapter I was told that chapter was “the most important one of all”. So I asked them to tell me what was so important about it and they gave me a quick resume of the chapter.
I ended up passing the exam and I recall that the professor (whom I met that day for the first time) made the remark that he clearly sensed that I “didn't study in order to be able to repeat all the details, but I was great at understanding the concept”.
By contrast, it happened many times to me that I did manage to start preparing with ample time, only to end up wasting most of it in either getting bogged down in interesting but unimportant details or simply spend time on different (often less productive) things.
The old saying, “The Devil find works for idle hands.” which is attributed to Henry David Thoreau might be a little theatrical, but too much time on our hands definitely leads to procrastination.A typical objection to this comes from people who have the belief that it is vital to know everything about a subject. However, it was Herbert Simon who pointed out: it is impossible to have perfect and complete information at any given time to make a decision.
"There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant" -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
How busy are you really?
Are you really as busy as you are claiming to be? As I pointed out in the beginning, it has become a badge of honour especially amongst professional people to boast just how insanely busy they are.
However, we all have the same amount of time (nobody has more or less than 24 hours a day or 168 hours per week). We are however seldom aware of what we use our time for.
If you want to rid yourself of the burden of business, before even applying the above mentioned methods (Pareto Principle, Parkinson's law, …) start with a simply trick: keep a log of how you use your time. Laura Vanderkam, author of “168 hours”, in a brilliant article in the Wall Street Journal, compares it with log for people that are keen to loose weight: keeping track of all the things you eat gives you awareness of what you are actually consuming. Likewise, keeping a detailed overview of what you actually spend your time on, will allow you to become much more aware of where that precious time goes to.
Because, let's not kid ourselves, time is by far our most precious resource.
We also tend to use a worst case day, in which we worked extremely long hours or for some reason didn't get much sleep, as our everyday scenario.
Can you honestly say, that during your working hours, there is no time spent on unnecessary activities, whether that is browsing the internet, talking to colleagues, going outside for a smoke, responding to emails that are outside of your realm of responsibilities, ...).
As an example, the average employed person in the US, according to the American Time Use Survey (2018) spends 2.8 hours watching TV.
Or how about this one: the average internet user spends 2 hours and 3 minutes on social media.
Clearly there is some room there to allocate time differently.
Photo by Gustavo Ferreira
As an exercise, try to reframe how you look at your time-use. Instead of saying "I don't have time" try saying "it's not a priority for me," and see how that feels. Of course, quite often that is a valid explanation for why we don't do things.
“I have time to iron my sheets, I just don't want to”.
But other things are harder. Try these one for size:
"I'm not going to come to your school play, sweetie, because it's not a priority."
"I don't go to the doctor because my health is not a priority."
If these phrases don't sit well, that's the point. Changing our language reminds us that time is a choice.
“Never be so busy as not to think of others.” -- Mother Teresa
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This is part of a series of articles designed to get more out of life.
You can follow me also on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-vandaele/
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