Being busy — or being “slammed” — used to exist as a badge of honor. But busyness often points simply to a lack of prioritization and effective planning. Is that what we hope to broadcast? That we are ruled by our calendars and inboxes instead of the other way around?
In a recent article, we discussed the crucial idea of leaving the “dance floor” for a view from “the balcony,” where dancing serves as a metaphor for — among other things — busyness. When leaders are very busy, we can usually count on the fact that certain things are falling through the cracks.
Unfortunately, those activities often include things like quality control, mentoring, and team building — not to mention planning and prioritization. But most harmfully, a decrease in these activities will inevitably lead to a drop in strategic results and innovation.
True productivity is often inversely related to how busy we are — and the same is true for our teams. Filling up our calendars and inboxes can give everyone a sense of productivity, but it’s a mirage if all these things aren’t tightly connected to our stated goals.
So, as leaders, it’s our job to identify what’s contributing to this constant, nebulous busyness — not just for ourselves, but also on behalf of our teams. Effective time management for leaders can trickle down and become an example for effective time management for others. This is how we can nurture a healthy culture and grow towards our goals.
What’s eating our time?
Why do new technologies — designed to make us less busy — seem always to do the opposite? In fairness, technology is generally not the problem. The way we respond to technology is the issue. A 2010 study found that a group of students preferred a 15 minute walk between tasks rather than simply waiting for 15 minutes between tasks. What this illustrates is that humans prefer action to inaction, and we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking we’ll suddenly opt for lounging around while the robots do all the work. We aren’t programmed (no pun intended) to make that choice.
So the question becomes: when new technological tools present us with additional time, how can we ensure we use that time to truly improve our productivity, rather than simply defaulting into busyness?
The COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on how we work offer an interesting example of this challenge. For those organizations which adopted some form of remote or hybrid work, virtual meetings became indispensable. But they also became too easy. Even the low bar of reserving a conference room and physically leaving our personal workspace was no longer required. As software further integrated our calendars, email inboxes, and meetings, it all blended into a single, humming cloud of busyness.
The bar for scheduling a virtual meeting has become so low, in fact, that many of us find ourselves — years later — still spending more time in meetings than we did before the pandemic. In order to raise the bar, Jeff Bezos famously requires any executive who calls a meeting at Amazon to prepare a six-page memo, which attendees spend 30 minutes silently reading and making notes on at the start of a meeting. How many unnecessary meetings would be stopped in their tracks by the looming burden of crafting a six-page memo?
The data on this are fairly clear, too. Recent research from Microsoft cites inefficient meetings as the number one barrier to productivity, with 68% of employees reporting they don’t have enough uninterrupted focus time during the workday. Additional research suggests that up to one-third of meetings are unnecessary (as if we needed research to tell us that). It’s too easy to fill our days with meetings, simply call it productivity, and go on dancing.
The same is true for other collaboration tools, as well. And while not all of them affect leaders as profoundly as they do the rest of our teams, we need to be aware of them and the growing pile of research warning us against their harm.
In order to do more, do less
Because of our natural proclivity for busyness, along with cultural forces that have long reinforced the idea that a busy person is a productive and valuable person, we repeatedly miss opportunities presented to us through new technologies to reclaim time for true productivity.
There are a few steps we can take to address this:
- We can reframe how we value thinking versus how we value action. Action is necessary for reaching our strategic goals, but it’s not sufficient. We also need time to think — i.e. time on the balcony. You won’t win a game of chess without moving your pieces, but the time you spend thinking about which moves to make far exceeds the time you spend moving the pieces. Often, one very thoughtful action can represent a larger step forward than 50 impulsive ones.
- We can conduct a technology audit. Every new tool we adopt should create a clear and distinct time surplus we can identify and capitalize on. If it doesn’t, why are we using it? A virtual meeting that saves 30 minutes of driving is a good thing. Failing to invest those extra 30 minutes in accordance with our stated values and goals squanders the benefit we captured through technology. If, as leaders, we are deciding which systems and tools are adopted, we need to be especially aware of their unintended consequences.
- We can follow our personal productivity rhythm. Each of us will find that we are most focused and productive at certain times of day. We may also find that certain environments enhance our ability to think strategically or creatively. To ignore these preferences is to do ourselves a disservice. If you’re a fan of The Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI), a good practice can be organizing tasks based on your thinking preferences, and dedicating the time when you are most energized to the tasks that coincide with your lowest preference.
- We can embrace rest as a valid and crucial component of productivity. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, author of “Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less,” points out that “even in our brain’s resting state — when we are not directly focused on a task — it’s still active, engaging its ‘default network’ to plug away at problems, examine and toss out possible answers, and look for new information.” It’s time to finally put to rest the expectation that we’ll “rest when we’re dead.” This will send a message to our organizations, and set an example that we take seriously the need for rest. If we or our teams approach work with the idea that we’ll only rest when the work is done, it’ll feel like running a marathon with no finish line. Rest should be an active part of the journey, not a reward for completing it. This can be especially important for hybrid or remote workers, for whom the lines between work and personal life can become blurry.
Protecting our teams from busyness burnout
How are leaders supposed to navigate themselves out of busyness and protect their teams from the same struggle? First and foremost, continuing to glorify busyness as the highest marker of value is a direct path toward burnout.
Burnout in the workplace is not new—but it is worsening. SHRM’s Employee Mental Health in 2024 Research Series, released for Mental Health Awareness Month in May, found that 44 percent of 1,405 surveyed U.S. employees feel burned out at work, 45 percent feel “emotionally drained” from their work, and 51 percent feel “used up” at the end of the workday.
A main contributor to burnout is the feeling of “overwork” or an unmanageable workload, according to Jennifer Moss, author of The Burnout Epidemic: The Rise of Chronic Stress and How We Can Fix It.
Overwork feeds the feeling of busyness, which in turn can lead to burnout.
Here are some tactics we have seen work at clients and that we’re using with our own team.
- Help teams help themselves. It’s important that we as leaders create work environments that set teams up for success, but its also important we arm teams with the tools they need to combat the busyness fallacy for themselves. We should encourage our teams to also explore the four steps above. When we empower those in our organization to think through an issue or initiative before acting, we allow them to anchor their actions to a theory they’ve helped to develop. This deepens the sense of clear purpose we want everyone to feel at work and helps them feel more in control of their own destiny.
- Teach them not to default. No one is safe from the effects of meeting creep and the constant “ping” of collaboration tool notifications. If a team member audits their use of virtual meetings and finds that the extra time created by the technology has simply been filled with more meetings, there’s likely a need for an adjustment in the organization’s culture around meetings. We should also encourage our teams to question how much time a meeting requires, and how much contact is really needed throughout the day. There’s no reason meetings need to stretch to 30 or 60 minutes just because our digital calendars are divided that way, or for 100 Teams messages to be sent over the course of a work day.
- Stress the importance of work quality vs. work quantity. We should encourage our teams to discover and protect their own productivity rhythms. This is a topic we’ve touched on in the past, but it bears repeating. Constant interruptions are particularly harmful to deep work. How are you going to win a chess game if you’re constantly interrupted as you try to strategize your next move?
Leaders also must recognize that teams often mimic the pace set by leadership — so if we are glorifying unending hustle, consistently late hours, and a general lack of balance, that will seep into the culture. As a guardrail, we need to ensure that our teams are empowered to recognize busyness burnout when it’s happening to them and take initiative to mitigate it without fear of judgment.
Speaking of the need to recognize, we’ll be embarking next on a series of articles that dissect a number of key blind spots and biases leaders often develop. The first common blind spot we’ll discuss — “Going It Alone” — will continue to shed light on more ways we might be misallocating our time and making ourselves more busy and less productive, and what we can do to avoid it.