Why Are We so Busy ?
Posted Under: mind control, workplace success
“Doing nothing is better than being busy doing nothing.” Lao Tzu
I have heard it said, “you want something done, ask a busy person.” The premise here is, that busy people are motivated to get things done because they have very little time, so they are forced to get tasks out of the way quickly; whereas people that are not busy have a lot of time on their hands but no motivation to accomplish anything. It is assumed that busy people are skilled time managers. But is this assumption accurate? Is busyness just another form of laziness?
When you see a busy person working diligently away, are they actually accomplishing anything? I have personally witnessed many people work long days and accomplish very little, repeating the same inefficient tasks with the same inefficient method over and over again. Or they may spend an entire day on a certain task but take that task in the wrong direction, rendering their day’s work useless. These people work very fast, and take on a lot of tasks, but have they taken any time to ensure that what they are doing is efficient?
Some busy people are so determined to work at their feverish pace, so bent on busily working, that they fail to plan an efficient method of accomplishment. It is accomplishment through trial and error; maybe they are just too lazy to plan an approach and start things off in the right direction. Oh sure they do get their work done, but at what cost? With their hit and miss method of working they are continually placing themselves under enormous stress when they are not certain of the outcome of their endeavors. They blindly charge into an assignment hoping that they are heading in the right direction. If not, they bounce off the obstacles and attempt another way. On and on they toil until they stumble upon the solution almost by accident; definitely through the process of elimination.
Strangely enough this is how many employers actually train their staff. Trial by fire, training through not training. Figure it out on your own. They would rather see an employee working like a mad fool for pointless hours trying almost in vain to arrive at a solution to a problem, and paying them for those wasted hours, rather than simply training them how to get the job done efficiently. They look at this frazzled go-getter and say, “what a hard worker!” I know this beacause I have been that ‘hard worker’ too many times; spinning my wheels in the mud wearing myself out for very little reward. It seems absurd, but I am sure its a common model in our working culture. Doesn’t this then make the management lazy as well? Too lazy to take a bit of time to actually ensure that their investment in their workers is going to pay off.
I have also witness people who seem very relaxed at work, who saunter around the office chatting it up, who seemingly have a lot of time on their hands, achieve amazing results! These people are the true masters of time management. They don’t appear busy, and in truth, they’re not; but they may very well get more accomplished than their extraordinarily busy colleagues. How do they do it? I am going to call it compartmentalization. They have an uncanny ability to focus on a result and accurately plan a route, the path of least resistance, to achieve the desired outcome in the least amount of time with the least amount of effort. These people do not jump into the deep end and flail around until they find something that will float, they compartmentalize. They take some time to think about their game. They break a project down into it’s fundamentals and analyse the most intelligent approach to each step the job requires. A project is executed in a certain predetermined order; one step at a time, to build the staircase to completion. You can’t build a set of stairs starting with the third step!
What helps me to complete a project efficiently is to take the time to analyze a project in its entirity and to actually start from the end. Wrap your mind around what you will achieve and write down the steps to get from the finished product to where you are now, the beginning; write those steps down backwards, from right to left. This little technique helps me a lot. It somehow breaks the process down to its fundamentals quickly.
When we find ourselves becoming erratic and running around like a rat in a maze we need to realize that we are being hugely counter-productive. Busyness does not equate to efficiency, it is simply busyness. Remember the tortoise and the hair!
As Socrates warned us; “Beware the barreness of a busy life.”
