Overcoming the curse of busyness

Have you noticed that almost no conversation happens for more than a few minutes at the moment without somebody lamenting how busy they are?

Not long ago, when you asked someone how they were, 90 per cent of people replied with some version of “I’m well thanks”. Now a really high percentage replies to the same question with words like “I’m busy”, or “really busy”, “crazy busy” or “ridiculously busy”.

As a nation we have developed a very unhealthy obsession with busyness.

The truth is nobody is any busier today than they were yesterday, or last week or 10 years ago. It is simple maths – there are 24 hours in the day and you are doing something in each of those hours. Whether you are busy eating, running kids around, sleeping, cooking, watching TV, feeding the birds or working, every day of your life is equally busy.

The question is how you prioritise what you do on a particular day, the speed at which you do particular tasks and how much you can realistically handle in your allocated time. Once you understand that, you will never be busy again.

Why this matters

Busyness is a problem because we frame it as something that is broken in our lives and causing us stress. Worse still, there is evidence everywhere that we are trying to manipulate time to create more space for all the options currently available to us.

Sleep is the starkest example. People are clawing back valuable sleep to fit more in. The last Australian Bureau of Statistics Nutrition and Physical Activity survey showed people aged 25 to 64 were now averaging less than eight hours sleep a night and men aged 35 to 54 are down to seven hours and 37 minutes. That is the average, meaning a heck of a lot of people are sleeping less than that. In the US, according to researcher Mark Penn average sleep has fallen 25 per cent since the 1900s.

From this we have health problems, road rage, irritability, a steady erosion of quality thinking and a feeling among most adults that they can’t remember the last time they didn’t feel at least a little bit tired.

Off the back of the busyness epidemic, we have also created express everything: shopping aisles, traffic lanes, internet jump-the-queue pre-sales – all feeding the view that it must be done fast because we don’t have enough time.  

Then we have Gen Y, raised in this uber-busy world and trained to consume four different types of media at once, impatiently and manically pushiing traffic light and lift buttons in the hope of a miracle and texting frenziedly and continuously as if diffusing a bomb.

What causes it?

One word: options. We have more than we were trained to handle. The busyness thing seemed to hit its social vortex point around 2005. This was about the time that broadband took off and moved the internet options into a different dimension.

It is also the point where David Chalke’s AustraliaSCAN data showed that, for the first time, Australians thought having more choice was a net negative and they began to report serious restraint on their time. The world was suddenly saying: “Enough already – too many choices”. In a generation we had gone from a world of simple options to one where we didn’t know where to start.

What you can do about it?

At various stages in my career I have been really good at time management and really bad at it. However, spending several years running a busy metropolitan newspaper “backbench” taught me a few things about the reality of time.

In those jobs you hit the same deadline each day regardless of whether there are tumbleweeds blowing along the streets or a major disaster. You are forced to adjust to being busy doing just the right things.

This year I decided I would never again answer the question of how I am with any version “busy”. The following are some thoughts on overcoming the busyness curse:

1. Stop doing stuff

If you are suddenly faced with a to-do list that is too much for the hours in the day, take routine or non-urgent things off it. This seems bleeding obvious but so few people do it. In the workplace, in particular, people have a habit of keeping the normal structure of their day (regular meetings etc) and just adding more and more things. This doesn’t work and ends up with lots of things half done or rushed. You need to put brutal red lines through things to prioritise the urgent/important stuff. Time management is about prioritisation through intelligent and ruthless substitution, not piling on top of an already capacity day.

2. Two-pace work

This is also known as bunching chores. People typically have a long list of things to do and work through them in random order. Some things take quite a while, others a few minutes. If you cluster the things that only take a few minutes into a “super hour”, where you do those and nothing else, it is astounding how much you can get through. It is also satisfying to be crossing lots of the to-do list in quick time.

3. Have a realistic to-do list

Outside of the minor chores, most people get about 2-3 things done each day and often have a to-do list three times that size. The result is a constant feeling of failure. You should just be realistic. Have a list that matches your day and delegate or delay the rest. There is no value in pretending.

4. Allocate working and planning time

A lot of people only put meetings in their diary. I have found that my day works much better if my diary is always full but no more than 40-50 per cent of it is meetings. If there are things that need planning, writing, following up etc, you need to set aside time. This is also good discipline. If you need an hour to actually produce work, you need to set that hour aside. Otherwise you just end up squeezing your real work between meetings that are typically inefficient.

5. Do 15-minute meetings

For reasons I can’t explain, there is an assumption in almost every workplace that a meeting takes exactly 30 minutes or 60 minutes and our calendars reflect that. Where is the evidence of it? Try having internal meetings diarised for 15 minutes and do them standing up. You will get pragmatic decisions and discussions, and many productive hours back in your week.

6. No meeting Friday

This is not a new idea, but it works. Just knock back all meetings on a Friday and use the time to finish the week cleanly and plan for the following week. If you get office-wide collusion on this, the whole place will be more productive.

7. Don’t stop to answer every email

Except for urgent ones, or emails from the boss, emails should be mostly dealt with in blocks. Lots of people stop and do something every time an email comes in. If you realistically look at the productivity and work continuity impact of this, it is quite frightening. I suspect it is the biggest productivity killer of the past decade.

8. Stick to your lane and keep out of the noise

I was a great admirer of the way former University of Queensland Vice-Chancellor Professor John Hay managed his time. At the time I worked there he was running a $1.3 billion institution yet I could always get into see him at short notice. He knew the trick of taking a helicopter view and keeping out of the “noise” that too many senior managers get stuck in. If you understand your role and stick to your lane, your time will return.

It is generally accepted that the really great sportspeople have an edge because they always seem to have more time than anyone else. The same applies in the workplace, and in life. Busyness is a curse. It is great to be active, engaged and well utilised, but you should give yourself permission to never declare yourself busy again. It will change your life.

A version of this article appeared in The Australian on May 4. Comments in these posts are personal. Shane Rodgers is a business executive, writer and marketer with a keen interest in social change and what makes people tick. He is the author of Tall People Don’t Jump – the curious behaviour of human beings.