The Cult of “Busy-ness”

Being busy doesn’t equate to business success. Is your busy-ness leading you in the right direction? Or are you being led by your inputs? Prioritization takes uninterrupted time and discipline, but it results in your activities having strategic direction. 

One of the things I remember my father saying a lot was, “Those who fail to plan, plan to fail.” It was annoying to hear, especially as a teenager who I now realize had a half-baked prefrontal cortex and almost no ability to delay gratification.

I think we have a different challenge today that is the primary thing that gets in the way of real prioritization or planning, I’ll call it the cult of “busy-ness.” The technology we have adopted over the last decade has enabled us to be “reachable” via a huge number of channels, in all locations, at all times. This has created an “interrupt driven” workday and what looks like simply keeping up with the inputs as being defined as “real work.” The issue with this is that the inputs are not coming into you in any sort of prioritized order. If your day is simply managed by what inputs reach you, there is a good chance you’re ignoring what’s most important to your business. The cult of busy-ness makes it difficult to justify taking time in order to prioritize what your next action should be. Think about how silly that sounds. Your time is your most precious resource; planning and prioritizing how you’re going to spend it should not be so difficult.

I think the reason we don’t want to plan/prioritize is that it forces us to make the difficult decisions that we keep deferring. If your company is still running on a Print MIS solution whose support stopped two years ago, wouldn't you rather focus on getting a customer job out the door than deal with that elephant in the room? If you keep yourself busy you can justify your procrastination on the difficult decisions. Going to work in a custom manufacturing company provides a perfect opportunity for distraction and the cult of busy-ness.

I was a big fan of David Allen’s classic book "Getting Things Done." Published almost 15 years ago, it is still relevant today. The premise that I took away from his methodology was to frontload the prioritization when your willpower is high (think full access to your prefrontal cortex). Basically, you plan how you are going to spend your time so that when you start a day, you are not randomly responding to inputs, you are actually doing what is next most important according to your established priorities. You become less available. I think that’s a good thing. You respond a little slower. You get more done. You get more important aspects of your business done. You move forward based on your priorities, not on the whims of your inputs. 

When I worked for a large company in this industry for a couple years, the president of the company famously said during an all hands meeting that he wanted people to respond faster to emails. He believed that the response time driven by the inputs would drive the business forward. It would definitely drive the business in some direction—I’m just not sure what direction that would be because who’s prioritizing the inputs?

It takes discipline to NOT respond to all the inputs. It takes discipline to schedule uninterrupted time where you can get work done. It pays off. First of all, you feel better at the end of the day because you actually accomplished something. Another author I love in this space is Cal Newport—his last four books are brilliant examples of what happens when you step away from the inputs and get real work done. 

I was working with a printer whose owner personified the mantra of disabling inputs to get real work done. I flew across the country to meet with him and some other colleagues on an important project. We were in his facility, meeting in his office. He never once answered the phone, he never looked at his email, he never once got interrupted by his team to solve some manufacturing process. He was 100% focused on the strategic subject I had flown across the country to discuss (on his dime). In contrast, I have gone to many print businesses where the entire “strategic” meeting was riddled with interruptions. The key people who were required to push strategic initiatives through the business could not dislodge themselves from the day-to-day operations for even a couple hours. 

Almost every spiritual tradition says that quieting the mind is the first step to a higher level of consciousness. The business side of this is quieting the day from interruptions. You cannot be strategic without first detaching from the manic inputs that will fill all empty space if allowed. Business success doesn’t come to the busiest. It comes to the businesses that are consistently doing the next most important thing according to their well thought out strategic priorities.