No matter your job title or experience, keep in mind that being busy is not better.
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When I became CEO, I had to redefine the word “busy.”
There’s a misconception that you’re less busy as a CEO. Sure, the decisions are bigger, but the assumption is you’ve earned the right to kick back a little.
Don’t believe it.
Being a CEO means fifteen-hour days, eighty-hour weeks, all packed with code-switching from meeting to meeting, dealing with the board, fielding questions from investors, forming strategy, and making the tough decisions that impact everyone in the business.
So no matter what your job title or experience is, you always have to keep in mind:
Busy is not better. Output is better.
Output Isn’t Relative
The problem is that “busy” is a relative term. People have their own definitions of “busy” based on their own experiences. Or else, people feign busyness because they want to be perceived as hard workers.
And since people want to keep their jobs, “busy” becomes a workplace badge of honor.
Busy doesn’t equal results, though. As Tim Ferris says in his book The 4-Hour Workweek, “Being busy is a form of laziness.”
Context matters when it comes to “busy.” An employee on a production line who has to do quality control on 800 syringes is certainly busy. Some of our plasma collection centers for CSL saw 1,000 donors a day. Talk about busy under pressure! But in both examples, the output is measurable, justifying the job’s busyness.
You have to stop measuring your day by how busy it was. Start measuring it by how much you actually accomplished. Measure by the actions you took that created real-world results, solved real problems, and added value.
The Zero-Sum Approach
Busyness has a way of sneaking into the very fabric of how a company is run. And if you’re not careful, it will devour your resources.
For example, around budget time each year, I’d start to hear the familiar buzzing of the busy bees:
“I’m so busy! I need to hire more people!”
The problem with this mentality is that you can always find stuff for people to do. You can make yourself busy, especially if you’re always looking to add value. But what you need to do is reevaluate the nature of the busyness to see if it’s productive busy or distraction busy.
You need to create a zero-based budget and a zero-based work plan. If this is a new term for you, it simply means you build your budget from the ground up every year. Zero-based approaches are more strategic because you stop assuming your needs are the same year to year. You start asking, “What do we truly need to achieve our objectives?”
In practice, a zero-based work plan doesn’t assume you need more hands on deck just because you’re busy. Instead, you ask, “What am I able to get done with the people I already have? Are we doing any work that doesn’t actually add value? If so, what can we cut out to be leaner?”
Redefine Busy with Values
Finally, redefine busy in a long-term context. Most people define “busy” in the short term, so it becomes an excuse for why nothing gets done.
Instead, evaluate the objectives through the lens of the company values. Evaluate the work in terms of the mission. When you align accomplishments with the company values, you can narrow your focus to separate productive busy from distraction busy.
Once you can see that an activity isn’t contributing to the values or mission, then you know it’s just a distraction. Drop it from the work plan!
The answer to busyness isn’t adding more people to your team or increasing your work hours. Instead, eliminate distractions so you can maximize your time. Values will be your compass.
You don’t have to fall into the fallacy of busyness. Reach out to me through my website, and let’s talk about how to help you realign your work with adding real value. Or you can read more on these ideas in my book The Detour CEO.
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