The Glorification of Busy in Marketing Land

THE GLORIFICATION OF BUSY

If you’re like me, your life is a bit like a hamster wheel – built specifically for our human legs & cardiovascular machines, but no so much primed for healthy minds or souls. We live out our best years as worker bees, bound by a monotonous & perpetual cycle that has been colloquially dubbed the 9-to-5. I say colloquiallybecause we all know that, as marketers, we’d love an actual 9-to-5. I’ve heard typical working hours called out as “Gentlemen’s hours” often. Ahem, gentlepeople. This is 2019. 

As children we’re told that to be successful, we’ll need to be a part of cycle, a cog in the proverbial wheel if you will, the to be a true success. So, we work hard. No one can take our toil from us. But why do we do it? What is it about a flashy, creative title that intrigues us? Is it the award potential, the pats on the back, the metalware sitting on the mantel at home that reminds us of how clever we are when wielding a pen or buying ad placements that get lucky? So many of my fellow marketers aim for the top. They forget how important they are as individuals who were put on earth to do other things that get lost in the mire of retail – simply so that one day they might be graced with a trifecta of holy letters – CMO. 

We give our all to it & we lose out a lot of time, sleep, adventures, milestones of our children, & dreams to it. If we’re 100% honest with ourselves, whether we’re working in retail, banking, entertainment, travel, media... you name it...we’re all the same. Hesitant marketers or proudly “out” marketers, our modern professional lives begin each morning in traffic on the way to the office & end each evening in the same way (but in the opposite direction, obvs.) We see little of our families & even less of our friends. We connect online passively & see children growing up through the lens of our smartphones. 

At work, we’re busy damnit. So, so busy. We run, run, run on that human hamster wheel until our legs & minds are almost at breaking point. When we get to such a state of exhaustion, integral aspects of our strategic minds start to sit down on the sideline for a breather. 

When we’re so intent on putting one foot in front of the other for fear of crashing & burning, what we lose is perspective. Surely the most important part of running the race is taking in the course around you? But tunnel vision kicks in. We forget ourselves, and often we forget the people we’re trying so hard to impress: our customers. All of this because we as an industry glorify the hell out of being busy. 

Burnout. Anxiety. Other disorders brought on by stress. They’re here & they’re gunning for all of us. As groan-worthy as this is going to sound, I need to come clean. I myself have suffered quite the millennial burnout (this is a real, documented thing). Let me tell you friends, rock bottom isn’t a beautiful place to fantasize about. You don’t fall down & then magically get back up, wipe yourself off, & then have a great story to tell once you hit another pinnacle on the other side of the climb. Nope. Rock bottom is shitty, shit-filled, & it is more often than not a place where we break into a million tiny pieces. Some of which never get put back into place. 

In reading up on how we can stop chasing our own tails & demystify the beauty that we’re told dwells in the act of being busy, I’ve found a lot of scientific studies (not to mention a lot of non-scientific ones) point towards the beauty of boredom. Or, rather, in just being. The art of being still for the sake of being still has a lot of names. And, in our society that views standing still as something akin to laziness, most of them have negative connotations. 

Not niksen though. To the Dutch, niksen is the idea of purposefully doing nothing. And, this idea is my stillness-Bae. At the heart of it, adding moments of doing nothing makes a lot of sense. Taking the time to  do things that seem wasteful of time – like staring out of a window (not weirdly at other people, that’s creeper territory) or sitting motionless without a screen in front of your face – are important acts of self-care. When we daydream or allow our minds to wander without boundaries or pure intent, we allow ourselves to embrace the way in which our own individual minds wander. Fun! Modern workplaces have breaks built into the day, yet we rarely take breaks. As someone who’s been in the corporate game for a loooooooong time now, I didn’t start taking breaks until recently. And, even then, when things get (AHEM) busy, I push my quiet time aside in favour of meetings, spinning wheels, & random deadlines that we exhaust ourselves over to deliver to.

If we all know that we need to slow down, why is busy-work something we still brag about? When did keeping up with the Jonses take on the tonality of professional time wasting? Slowing down is the new luxury. Stopping for a moment to catch your breath & clear your mind – pure bliss. As much as we’re a smart crew as a collective, we keep fanning the flames of exhaustion & setting into our foundations bad habits that will follow those that come after us. We don’t slow down. We refuse to slow down. We keep running headlong into burnout because if there’s one thing we love to brag about in today’s uber-connected & fast paced world, it’s this: man, we’re BUSY!

But WE MUST STOP THIS UTTER BULLSHIT WAY OF WORKING, LIVING, & DYING. (Whoa, apologies for the shouty-CAPS... Momma is passionate about this.)

As for me, my give-a-damn was busted a while ago when it comes to letting everyone know how busy I am. I mean, halle-fukkin-lujah, right? As a fantasist optimist (yes, someone called me this once in a way that was meant to wound... it didn’t) I reckon we can stop the humble brag that masquerades as martyrdom. In the past few years, I’ve taken formidable & intentional steps away from the glorification of busy.

Most days I wake up before the rest of my household & wander for a good 15minutes. Wander? You mean, like, walk around & wake-up slowly without any aim whatsoever? Yep. That. It’s a bit like meditation without the namaste & the ohms. And, for me, it works. After my body & brain are both awake, I spend a few minutes identifying moments in the day that could be simple time-fillers/wasters. You know them well, I know you do. They’re things like those three hour-long meetings about meetings to identify time to have more meetings? They can be sneaky, too. They waft into your calendar in a state of back-to-back 30min WIPs without you even knowing. And, if you can’t decline them beforehand, you’re forever known as “that person who declines meetings at the last minute.” So yeah, I flat out decline time-wasters when I see them come in & even when I don’t.

Most people know my boundaries well enough now & send through three bullet-points about what they need from me & I get back to them pretty quickly. This makes life easier for all of us who survive by filling in requests for people above us on some marketing org chart. Let’s talk about this part of the culture of busy, too. Folks at the top (whom I truly believe to be mostly well-intentioned) walk into a room on Tuesday asking for yellow roses, then change their mind on a Wednesday & want them red. The flow-on effect of lackadaisical decision making is a shit-ton of busy work that is ineffective. For all of us who lead & make decisions, I beg of you: think about the impact of your words, moods, & directives. DO NOT CREATE MORE PILES OF BUSY WORK FOR PEOPLE TO DO. Kthxbye. 

Right, ranty pants are off now & I’m back in something a bit more comfy & less confrontational. The way I look at my work flow & effectiveness for a company, project, or role comes down to what is expected of me & what I deliver. I truly believe that e-mail is merely someone else’s to-do list for me, & I refuse to answer the call of paper shuffling in the digital age. When prioritizing my work, I get to prioritize my day. When I think about e-mails, I truly believe that if someone really wants me to dive into solving a problem that they’ll ask me specifically & add a timeframe to the delivery of whatever it is that they’re after. It is not my job to be a desk-junkie who sits awaiting a little ping of supposed importance as another communication rolls into my inbox. I dunno about you, but inbox zero is my happy place. Perhaps my Montessori childhood grew me into an adult who doesn’t sit well with banality, or perhaps I personally am hardwired to needing to bring structure to my work-life, either way I’ve started to unpack busy for myself & for my colleagues. But how?

Well, firstly, let’s look at language. We’ve already identified that (as a collective) marketers love a good colloquialism or bit of slang to keep us glued together. When it comes to glorifying the time-fillers, we need to recognize when we’re using language to put lipstick on the proverbial pig. Dress it up all you want, but each time someone says “I’d love to help, but I am so stacked/busy/full up...” a magical marketing fairy dies in the Forest of Creativity. 

When you hear yourself saying anything like the above, check yourself. Stop in your tracks. Put down the spreadsheet. And, simply be present. It’s amazing how much you can get done when you focus on one thing. Drop the busy. When I think about all of the time we waste as desk jockeys running from meeting room to meeting room in an attempt to get in our 10,000 steps, I think of Tim Ferriss & his 4 Hour Work Week. Now, I should say straight up, not many of us can simplify productivity down from 60 hours a week to 4 hours, but why not aim for something that allows us to do less, better?

Beyond the language we use to dig deeper foundations into a soft earth beneath us, we need to stop praying at the altar of Busyness. Being busy is not a badge to be worn proudly, it’s the opposite of such. Restfulness, taking time to think through strategy & projects, & building in space to be creative is necessary now more than ever in professional spaces. 

If doing less but outputting more was actually a “thing” wouldn’t everyone be opting for it? You’d assume so. But, nope. We’ve been trained to think that quiet time, idle time is time wasted. But, without it, how are we as creative & strategic beings hellbent on creating awesome work going to find the space to create? We need time to allow our minds to think critically. To wander creatively. 

The first iteration of an idea is usually never the best – but most of the times these days, it’s all we’ve got. We don’t question constructively for fear of becoming busier still. We fear what we desire, being busy. 

Which leads me to kindness. And, to being our best selves at work & at home. In a fast-paced industry, the best thing you can ever know is who you are. Without a title. Without a corner office. Without a uniform on. Who are you afterhours? 

Don’t worry if you can pinpoint your passions beyond your profession (actually, worry, but do something about it). I can’t stress the importance of spending time of getting all namaste & diving deep into thy self. The SELF. Getting to know yourself means you’ll be more engaged, confident, & driven across all aspects of your life. You’ll also have a much more attuned bullshit monitoring system when it comes to playing the game of glorifying busy. When asked to half-ass a project or to twiddle your creative thumbs for the sake of it, you’ll know when to say “no thanks.” 

You’ll reclaim your time. And, you’ll be a much better & more productive marketer for it. Promise! Take time to explore the world beyond your daily routine.