The Cult of Busy..ness

How was your week? Busy.

How’s your month looking? Busy

How’s life looking? Busy

The cult of ‘busy.. ness’.  Sometimes it feels like a badge of honour that we brand ourselves with.  ‘I’m Denise Super Busy, nice to meet you’.  It can make us feel important.  And burnt out.

Every team.  Every leader that I’m working with is saying the same.  I’m / we’re busy.

Always on the go.  Always doing….something.

Here’s a question.  Are you busy focusing on the right things?  The mission-critical, value add stuff.  Or are you caught up in the hamster wheel of doing what you’ve always done?

Time to reset and refocus.

The past few years have had us scrambling to find new ways of working alongside the business as usual stuff.  #8 wire remote working systems, protocols, and practices.  Flat out.  In the trenches.  When we’re down in the trenches it’s hard to see up and outside the trenches to figure out if we’re heading in the right direction, have the right people in the right seats (in a tight labour market I feel the eye roll!) and systems and practices that enable, rather than disable.

My take is that we have become hardwired into ‘busyness’.  We need to circuit break.

Time to pause.  To re-set.  To ask:

• What are our key external challenges? What does the future horizon look like and how do we need to adapt?
• Who are our key stakeholders and what are their expectations of us?
• Which stakeholders are we not engaging enough?
• What does value look like for them?
• Are we delivering? How do we know?
• Are we set up for success? What systems, processes and practices are murky, unclear or unfit for purpose?
• Do we have a vision that is compelling and understood by all?
• Does our culture enable or disable?
• How am I and my team feeling about our work? What needs to be different?

Being busy is a decision.   Make that decision count.

When folk ask me  “You busy?”, my answer is “I’m as busy as I choose to be”.