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THE BUSYNESS PARADOX: WHY YOU LOVE BEING BUSY (EVEN THOUGH IT’S BURNING YOU OUT)

Posted: July 30, 2019August 9, 2019 By: Jory MacKay Category: Burnout,
Meaningful Work Discussion 4 Comments on The busyness paradox: Why you love
being busy (even though it’s burning you out)

Why do we feel so compelled to always be busy? Why is it that the moment there’s
not a mile-high stack of tasks or projects on our plate, we suddenly feel
anxious and unsettled (when really the opposite should be the case). Busyness
has become the new normal. And that’s a problem. 

There’s a paradox when it comes to busyness that goes like this: 

Anyone with professional ambition strives to do great work and be recognized for
their talent, and therefore in high demand (i.e. busy). However, the more in
demand you are (i.e. busy), the harder it is to provide the same quality of work
or creative thinking that got you there in the first place. 

If being in demand is proof you’re doing a good job, it’s easy to mistake
busyness for validation. But the opposite of busyness isn’t laziness or
emptiness or unmoored drifting through life. It’s purpose. Choice.
Prioritization. Being busy is letting others control your time. Being purposeful
is being in the driver’s seat.

So how can we get out of the busyness trap and take back control of our time? 

RescueTime helps you stay focused on the work that matters most. Find our more
and try it for free today!


WHY BUSYNESS BECAME THE NEW WORKPLACE RELIGION (AND HOW IT’S KILLING CREATIVITY,
PRODUCTIVITY, AND HAPPINESS)

When you give in to the cult of busyness, you give up one of the greatest tools
we have for being productive, happy, and protecting ourselves from burnout:
rest. In order to do meaningful work, become more creative and productive, we
need to take a step away from the always-on, no-room-to-breathe, hectic pace of
the modern workplace. 

But instead of stepping back, most of us lean in. We do more to make up for our
lack of original thinking when we should be doing less. 

When the team at ideas42 studied the situations and working styles that lead to
busyness, overwork, and burnout, they found one common trait. While pretty much
every organization claims that balance and time off are key values, few actually
act that way.  

> “At one organization, workers said they felt that no one should work more than
> 45 hours a week. Yet the typical employee actually works more than 52.”

But why is that? Why do we drown in busyness after saying we don’t want to? 

For some people, it’s unrealistic expectations. Your company is understaffed and
overworked and you feel there’s no other choice. For others, it might come from
poor time management skills. You’re bouncing from one task to the other with
little time to focus on what really needs to get done. 

(Our own research of 185 million hours of working time found that most people
only have 2 hours and 48 minutes a day of productive time.)

But there’s another, more common scenario: You like being busy.  

As author Tim Kreider writes in The Busy Trap, busyness is usually self-imposed.
The people most likely to complain about busyness got into that state from their
own ambition, drive, and the anxiety of what they might face in the absence of
busyness:  

> “Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against
> emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or
> meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the
> day.” 


HOW BUSYNESS BECOMES BURNOUT

Being busy makes us feel good. But it’s also burning us out. 

Even when we know we want to find more work-life balance, spend time on
meaningful work, and disconnect at the end of the day, actually doing that is
another story. 

This is thanks to a behavioral phenomenon called tunneling. Here’s how it works.

When we’re busy running around, answering emails, putting out fires, and racing
to back-to-back meetings, time becomes much more scarce. To deal with that
scarcity, our brains effectively put on blinders. 

Suddenly, we’re not able to look at the big picture and instead can only
concentrate on the most immediate (often low-value) tasks in front of us.
(Research has even found that we lose 13 IQ points when we’re in a tunneling
state!)

However, when we pop our heads above water at the end of the day, we realize
that we’ve spent barely any time on the work that really matters. In one study
published in the Harvard Business Review, researchers found that at most
companies, employees spend 80% of their day on this busywork. In the end, this
leaves “employees little time for all the critical work they must complete on
their own.”

When we’re too busy to complete our work during work, we take it home with us.
Even worse, we don’t see the problem in that. As Brigid Schulte, author of
Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time, writes: 

> “Unlike a century ago, when Americans showed their status in leisure time,
> busyness has become the new badge of honor.” 

Without intervention, we fall back into the same habit day after day and our
busyness compounds until we hit burnout. 


WHAT’S THE OPPOSITE OF BUSYNESS?

So if busyness is so bad, what’s the alternative? Sloth? Laziness? Apathy? As we
said earlier, busyness isn’t just the absence of time. It’s also the absence of
choice.

The opposite of being busy is being purposeful. You can be purposefully busy,
but you can’t be busy and purposeful.   Click To Tweet

As Tim Kreider writes: 

> “Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as
> indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we
> suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets.”

You don’t have to just take his word on it, either. For years, researchers have
proven the positive impact of activities that are in stark contrast to busyness.
Here’s just a few:

 * Boredom and daydreaming: Research shows that being bored or idle activates a
   wider area of the brain and helps improve creative thinking.    
 * Deliberate rest: Engaging in activities you enjoy outside of work (like
   hobbies) is one of the most common traits among highly successful artists,
   entrepreneurs, and executives.  
 * Flow: One study found that executives able to focus deeply on a single task
   were 500% more productive than when bouncing between tasks. 
 * Socializing: In one study, people who engaged in social interaction showed
   higher levels of cognitive performance immediately afterward. 
 * Disconnecting from work: Research has found that people able to disconnect
   from work have less work-related fatigue, lower rates of procrastination, and
   better mental and physical health. 


3 WAYS TO REDUCE THE BUSYNESS IN YOUR WORKDAY AND LIFE

It’s not enough to just say you want to be less busy. As we’ve already seen,
busyness leads to bad decision-making and burnout. Instead, to break out of the
busyness trap, you need to gain insight and awareness into how you’re getting
trapped in the first place. 

However, this doesn’t mean that busyness is strictly a personal issue. Like most
issues of time management and focus, it’s the responsibility of both the
individual and the organization to fix it.

Whether you’re an employee or a manager, here are a few suggestions to help you
and your workplace be less busy:


1. UNDERSTAND WHERE YOUR TIME IS ACTUALLY GOING EACH DAY

The simplest way to stop from tunneling is to get insight into where your time
is going and set guardrails during the workday. 

First, let’s talk about getting insight into how you’re spending your day. Using
RescueTime, you can get an accurate picture of how you’re spending your time on
your computer, phone, and even in meetings and calls.

To start, use the Productivity Pulse and top activities on the main RescueTime
dashboard to quickly gauge how you’re spending your time. 

However, if you want to be more active in reducing busyness you need to go
beyond reflection. By setting up RescueTime Alerts, you can automatically get
notified when you’re falling into the trap of busywork. 

For example, I have an Alert that gets triggered if I spend more than an hour on
email in the morning. If I go over, I get a desktop notification reminding me
that “Emails don’t just take up time but distract me from more important work.”
(You can customize the message for yourself). 


2. SCHEDULE YOUR BUSYNESS WITH TIME BLOCKING

It’s impossible to say you won’t fall into busywork during the workday. There
are always fires to be put out and meetings to attend. But where busy turns into
busyness is when you give it the freedom to control your schedule. 

Instead, you can contain the amount of daily busyness by setting aside time for
it. One method that helps with this is time blocking. 

Simply put, time blocking is the practice of planning out every moment of your
day in advance and dedicating specific “blocks” for certain tasks or
responsibilities.

For example, you can “block” out time in the morning for meaningful work and
your top priorities. And then set aside time in the afternoon for busy work like
meetings and calls. 

This helps reduce busyness for a number of reasons. 

First, time-blocking forces you to recognize and set aside time for the work
that actually makes an impact. This might be coding or writing or
designing—whatever task you were hired to do. 

Second, it causes you to batch your busywork into specific moments during the
day rather than constantly switch between it and other work. Studies have found
we lose 20-80% of our productive time when we try to switch between tasks (aka
multitask). 

However, whenever you plan out your time in this way, you need to be aware of
the Planning Fallacy—our tendency to be overoptimistic about how long a task
will take us. You can start by making your best guess, and then use RescueTime
to hold yourself accountable and adjust your schedule.  


3.  MAKE BOTH WORK AND NON-WORK TIME MORE TRANSPARENT

Busyness is a byproduct of one of the largest shifts in how we work.

With the rise of knowledge work, it’s not always easy to show tangible results
at the end of the day. Our work and specific goals are fuzzy, which causes
people to be more performative in how they work. We act busy because we want
people to think we’re working hard. 

But by being more transparent about our workload we don’t have to be busy to be
seen as important. As Brigid Schulte writes, transparency creates “positive
friction” every time someone calls a meeting:

> “With priority work made more transparent, calling a meeting won’t be seen as
> cost free, but a values trade-off: what is everyone not doing because they’re
> at this meeting? And is the meeting the better use of everyone’s time?”

This transparency extends to your non-work time as well. As a manager or lead,
your team follows your example. 

When we interviewed 700+ professionals about how professional communication
bleeds into their personal life, 60% said they both check and reply to work
emails outside of work hours almost every day. 

Instead, being transparent about how you’re spending your time outside of work
allows the rest of your team to actually disconnect and recharge.  


LIFE IS ABOUT MORE THAN JUST BEING BUSY

There’s nothing worse than getting home after a long day of work and asking
“what did I even do?”

Busyness robs us of our purpose and agency. Instead of feeling in control and
making progress on meaningful work, we end up running around with little to show
for it at the end of the day.

This is nothing new. As the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca writes in On The
Shortness of Life: 

> “Everybody agrees that no one pursuit can be successfully followed by a man
> who is busied with many things, since the mind, when its interests are
> divided, takes in nothing very deeply, but rejects everything that is, as it
> were, crammed into it. There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than
> living: there is nothing that is harder to learn.”

Or, as Tim Kreider writes in the conclusion of The “Busy” Trap: 

> “Life is too short to be busy.”

How do you handle busyness? Let us know in the comments below or on Twitter.


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Jory MacKay

Jory MacKay is a writer, content marketer, and editor of the RescueTime blog.


4 COMMENTS

 1. 357girl says:
    July 31, 2019 at 10:12 am
    
    For the first time in my life I have a different problem. I have downtime in
    my position while waiting on others to complete their work. My question is,
    what is the best way to be purposeful with my downtime which strangely
    leaves me feeling adrift, unproductive and lacking purpose.
    
    1. Jory MacKay says:
       August 1, 2019 at 6:11 am
       
       That’s definitely a problem we’ve heard other people talk about. We even
       have a blog post that addresses what to do with your downtime:
       https://rescuetime.wpengine.com/downside-of-downtime/
       
       Ultimately, I think the best use of that time is to take control of it. I
       know I end up feeling adrift and frustrated when I’m waiting on other
       people or feel like my work isn’t being put to use because of something
       outside of my control. In those moments, I try to do something that is
       under my control, like getting ahead on other projects, looking for ways
       to optimize communication and collaboration with teammates, or even work
       on other work-related skills.
    
       
    
 2. Tesler Open Heaven says:
    August 5, 2019 at 9:22 pm
    
    Thank you Jory, these words have uplited my soul – ”But the opposite of
    busyness isn’t laziness or emptiness or unmoored drifting through life. It’s
    purpose. Choice. Prioritization. Being busy is letting others control your
    time. Being purposeful is being in the driver’s seat.”
    
    1. Jory MacKay says:
       August 6, 2019 at 9:06 am
       
       Thanks! I’m glad you connected with the post.
    
       
    

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