Analysis: Stop Glorifying Busy
Stop Glorifying “Busy”
Tony Pashigian Vice President, Detroit Manufacturing Systems LLC.
People wear “busy” like a badge of honor. It seems to get worse as technology continues to offer more ways to receive assignments and more ways to perform tasks simultaneously, or “multitasking”. People have lost a sense of the necessity to accomplish and, instead, amass huge task lists that occupy every minute of their busy days. The fact of the matter is that results are the only legal tender in the business world.
Quality of life, whether professional life or personal life, suffers from all of this busy. If every moment is spoken for then there is no buffer for spontaneity and no available bandwidth for contingencies when issues are encountered, which can cost you results. The stress associated with not having the time to recover from issues is not only unhealthy but it can lead …show more content…
Try writing a detailed email while talking on the phone to a person on a subject that requires your engagement. Impatience will drive you to try, but ask the person you are talking to if they feel like they have your full attention and I’d wager the answer is “no”. You might be able to kick-the-can down the road on both activities, but you never really get “in the zone” on either of them. It’s a special aspect of the desire to be busy. So, we kid ourselves into believing we can do it.
Instead of glorifying the busy feeling of multitasking, we’re better off if we focus on efficiently accomplishing one task at a time. It’s about accomplishment over activity. It’s also about accuracy and the quality of your work, which will improve if the task has your full attention. Question: How many people have you run into in a mall or on a sidewalk because they were too busy texting to actually pay attention to where they were walking? They were busy and they were
Tony Pashigian Vice President, Detroit Manufacturing Systems LLC.
People wear “busy” like a badge of honor. It seems to get worse as technology continues to offer more ways to receive assignments and more ways to perform tasks simultaneously, or “multitasking”. People have lost a sense of the necessity to accomplish and, instead, amass huge task lists that occupy every minute of their busy days. The fact of the matter is that results are the only legal tender in the business world.
Quality of life, whether professional life or personal life, suffers from all of this busy. If every moment is spoken for then there is no buffer for spontaneity and no available bandwidth for contingencies when issues are encountered, which can cost you results. The stress associated with not having the time to recover from issues is not only unhealthy but it can lead …show more content…
Try writing a detailed email while talking on the phone to a person on a subject that requires your engagement. Impatience will drive you to try, but ask the person you are talking to if they feel like they have your full attention and I’d wager the answer is “no”. You might be able to kick-the-can down the road on both activities, but you never really get “in the zone” on either of them. It’s a special aspect of the desire to be busy. So, we kid ourselves into believing we can do it.
Instead of glorifying the busy feeling of multitasking, we’re better off if we focus on efficiently accomplishing one task at a time. It’s about accomplishment over activity. It’s also about accuracy and the quality of your work, which will improve if the task has your full attention. Question: How many people have you run into in a mall or on a sidewalk because they were too busy texting to actually pay attention to where they were walking? They were busy and they were