Why Being Busy Is A Form Of Laziness.
Are you lazy? Countless busy people would say no to that question, but are they just deceiving themselves?
There’s a crucial difference between being busy and being productive. Productive people get critical work done, and busy people get stuff done. If we look at the industrial definition of productivity, it is the measure of output from a given input. This means that companies will always be looking at maximising the output while minimising the input. The less input required, the less the cost and time to produce the desired output.
Taking that to personal productivity means we minimise the number of tasks we need to perform to obtain a desired result. For example, I need to clear my email backlog, so I create a task that says, “clear email backlog”. I assign an amount of time for completing that task, and when that time comes, I sit down and focus all my energy and effort on clearing my email backlog.
Most people throw actionable emails into a task manager randomly and then spend ten minutes here and there, dealing with an email as an individual item. That’s a very inefficient way of managing something as simple as email.
To be more productive is all about prioritising your work. Work that supports your long-term goals, areas of focus and core work should always be prioritised above everything else — the noisy, demanding tasks that get thrown at us by our bosses, customers, and colleagues. Yet, it’s easier to deal with those loud, demanding tasks because what needs doing is clear (someone else told us what to do). They often don’t involve much thinking — send me that presentation file, call back a customer or arrange a team meeting.
If you allow your day to be controlled by the demands of others — their requests and messages — you are doing the easy stuff. It’s easy to react to these, and it gives you an excuse for not doing the important things. It’s hard to say to yourself: “I didn’t do this important thing because I allowed myself to be controlled by other people”, so we deceive ourselves by convincing ourselves that the work we did do was important.
Maybe it was important, but it wasn’t important to you. It was important to someone else. You didn’t take the time to assess the demand against what you know is important.
It’s much harder to think about and create a set of compelling long-term goals that inspires you. Or to spend a day or two developing your areas of focus. To accomplish that, you need to spend time thinking, and that is something you will avoid because it is hard. Far easier to let other people tell you what to do.
Not prioritising and getting to know what is important to you as an individual is taking the easy road. It’s lazy thinking. It’s hard to say “no” and to ignore all those bleeps and pings from your devices. Yet, if you want to become more productive, so you have more time for the essential things, that’s what you must do.
To spend time working on the things that are important to you, you first must decide what is important to you.
I remember when I worked in an office, one of my colleagues was a bodybuilder. He was strict about his diet and his exercise. These were important to him. No matter what, he would always leave the office at 5:30 pm and be at the gym by 6 pm, and he spent the next two hours doing his workout.
Andrew had established what was important to him. Work was just work. It was important in that it provided him with an income to support what was important to him.
Yet, Andrew was a model employee. He always got his work done, he never missed a deadline, and at the end of each month, when our workload increased, Andrew would come in an hour or two early, so his part of the work got done.
In his book, Tools Of Titans, Tim Ferriss writes: “Being busy is a form of laziness — lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions”.
Each day, there are very few tasks that are ‘critically important’. Yet, these are the hard tasks, the tasks we need to do some deep thinking about or focused work on. This deep thinking and the need to be undisturbed for an hour or two is difficult, so most people will do everything they can to avoid doing it. Often, these tasks carry a risk of failure, too, adding fear to the mix.
To become more productive, you need to look at what you do each day. What excuses are you making for not doing what you know deep down is important? We all do it — usually unconsciously — yet you need to become aware of these excuses. If you do not know what is important to you, you need to do the uncomfortable thing and take time to think about what you want, what is important to you, and prioritise these above everything else.
Nothing worthwhile in life is easy, and that is what makes it so special. Working on valuable things that develop and improve you as an individual is where you will find satisfaction, fulfilment and will stop you from feeling busy all the time.
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