Time Management at Work: Is Busyness Killing Business?

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Time Management At Work: Is Busyness Killing Business?

Effective time management at work has an enemy:
busyness.

Picture a manager new to the job, seated at an uncluttered desk. She reaches for her phone and says to her assistant: “Bring me an in-tray and an out-tray. And oh yes, some paper to shuffle between the two.” Busyness is the metaphorical equivalent of shuffling paper between two trays. It has the appearance of work, but doesn’t deliver anything.

Busyness is the opposite of effective time management at work. It's wasteful of time and resources and needs to be managed properly. This page looks at the nature of busyness, whether intentional or inadvertent, and suggests strategies for identifying and removing it from the workplace. After all, "busy-work" is the antithesis of "meaningful-work", a key ingredient in the pursuit of happiness.

We discuss effective time management further in our article on David Allen's approach to time management (there is a great short video at the end of this article by David Allen explaining his approach to GTD - Getting Things Done).

What Is Busyness?

Busyness is time spent doing unnecessary or unproductive work. Its exponents may look busy, but time spent in busyness lacks the effectiveness and efficiency of properly managed time. In a Peanuts comic strip Lucy tells Charlie Brown that she's decided to take up a hobby. He immediately commends her for deciding to accomplish something. To which she responds:

“Accomplish something? All I thought we were supposed to do was keep busy.”

If the work being performed is unnecessary, it's time wasted. Putting effort into identifying and removing busyness is not time wasted, and can yield significant rewards. But why does something so wasteful remain such a problem? Perhaps because the most powerful “quality” of busyness is that it has the appearance of work but without the substance.

Busyness is the sugar of the workplace. Sugary foods may look substantial and appealing, but they lack the fibre and value of healthy food. Just as it's easy to get hooked on the "naughty but nice" sin of sugar addiction, so too can busyness take root in an organisation, and with the same effects. Too little healthy input and healthy activity leads to lethargy, excess weight and inefficiency. If the outlook for sugar addicts is bleak, so too is the prognosis for organisations which allow busyness to flourish!

Without dealing with busyness it's difficult to see how time management at work can be improved. Because it's no longer time management at work, but the time management of busyness that is generating work. Unnecessary work. As Peter Drucker once said:

"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."

How Do You Recognise Busyness?

So how do we recognise busyness? Often simply becoming aware of its existence can open our eyes to the evidence around us.

Firstly analyse your work place and try to identify examples of poor correlation between effort and results. Close inspection may well indicate a number of these are caused by genuine reasons, such as resource or operational issues. However it's quite likely a significant number will be due to busyness. This is where your time management effort needs to be focused. Busyness doesn’t accomplish anything, it doesn’t deliver results for you, and it ruins any notion of effective time management at work.

What does busyness look like? Here are some common features to watch out for:

Doing well what doesn’t need to be done - surely the greatest waste.
Allowing other people's agendas - to drive what you do.
Doing nice work - but not important work.
Confusing fat for muscle – fat incurs additional cost for no additional income; muscle delivers purpose and value (for the customer), and therefore income.
Displacement activity – putting off what needs to be done by something that doesn’t need to be done.
Doing bits and pieces - allowing unimportant interruptions to distract from important tasks
Meetings – cut out unnecessary meetings wherever possible (especially meetings which don’t achieve anything or which you don't really need to attend).
Procrastination. - doing busy work to justify putting off less desirable but important tasks.
Indecision. - doing busy work to hide unwillingness to make decisions.
Cluttered work – extra time needed to work because of disorganisation or untidyness.
Lack of priority not lack of time - doing a large number of things that don't matter, compared to the small number of things that really do!

So, if time management at work is being adversely affected by busyness, how do we treat it?

Replacing Busyness With Real Work

Whilst diagnosing busyness may be relatively straightforward, treating it can be much more difficult. However, time spent dealing with the waste generated by busyness is an valuable investment.

People may be engaged in busyness for several reasons. It may be because they feel obliged to. Perhaps busyness is the inevitable result of routine, or custom and practice, especially in a culture which doesn't encourage change or constructive criticism in its workforce. Or it may be a reaction to negative or authoritarian management practices. Eradicating busyness in these instances will require a change in management attitude.

Arguably a more serious problem may arise if removing busyness requires a change in staff attitude. Employees may have become accustomed to busyness through (bad) habit, or through laziness (it's easier than thinking and changing). However busyness may also hide underpinning issues such as poor morale, inadequate or under-developed skills or a mis-match between the job requirement and staff ability. Either way, line managers need to find a way to discourage busyness and replace it with effectiveness, and this may not be easy.

Those who prefer the comfort of busyness to the challenge of effectiveness may be resistant to change. Some people can actually be very effective at being busy. Strategies for preserving busyness include:

Camouflage it! - hiding the true nature or (poor) value of work being done.
The buck starts here! - blaming other people for what's being done, or what's not being done.
Obstruct it! - stopping other people from effective working to protect the culture of busyness.
Maintain the status quo! - managing change by discouraging it.
Fudge it! - managers who set vague targets, give vapid feedback, or sanitise unpalatable results are encouraging busyness in themselves and their staff.

Do you find that you struggle with boss imposed activities which create busyness rather than effectiveness? We discuss this difficult, but crucial area in our article Boss Time Management: 10 Ways To Help Protect Your Own Time.

So, how do we deal with busyness? Before you can manage it in others you must first consider your own time management at work. Ask yourself four questions to clarify your own working practices:

Are your objectives clear, unambiguous and SMART? - specific, measurable, achieveable, relevant, time-bounded.
Is it clear which activities deliver results? - in relation to your objectives.
Does the task/activity need to be done? - does it add value to your organisation?
Does the activity do anything meaningful for your customer? - do they value it?

Then, when you are clear about the nature of the work, put some practical steps in place to combat busyness:

Be clear about what you are doing - so that you can be clear about what you don't need to do.
Ask “why”?, (nicely and often) - both of others asking you to do something, and of yourself in what you do.
Say “no”! - as often as is needed to keep maintain effectiveness over busyness.
Prune and review regularly - stop busyness creeping in by remembering: anything run by human beings will tend towards complexity.
Don't get too busy! If the day is filled with activity then it is too full.
Don’t confuse activity with productivity - or allow others to do so either.

Happiness And Time Management At Work

The final thing to remember is the importance of encouraging positive behaviour in the workplace. Replacing busyness with effectiveness in our own work practices is only the first step. Good managers will try to ensure this best practice is fostered thoughout the organisation. Review this article but focusing on busyness amongst your colleagues rather than in yourself. Then consider how you can change this by remembering the basics of happiness.

Positive psychologist Martin Seligman, considers that happiness and life satisfaction are achieved by attaining a balance between the pursuit of pleasure, engagement in relationships, and living a life of meaning or significance. In our opinion, removing entrenched attitudes to busyness can be achieved by fostering happiness in the workplace:

Promote pleasure - make work a pleasurable experience.
Encourage relationships - get to know your colleagues as people, not just employees
Emphasise meaningful work - better time management at work can be achieved by stressing the benefits to be gained by doing meaningful work.

We have included a great story in our article Benefits of Time Management which will help you think about what you really value about how you spend your time - beginning with the end in mind. It might be a good article to read after working through "time management at work" and identifying where busyness has crept into your work life.

“I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me: the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.” Jerome K Jerome.

We need to get busy in eradicating busyness, and releasing the time and energy for the real work that delivers real results. The rewards can be significant.

For more on time management at work click the link below and read one of our other articles.

For an interesting article on how busyness can result in boredom in the workplace click on this link Forget burnout, boreout is the new office disease.

Back to Time Management Information from Time Management At Work

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