reap the appropriate rewards when it’s completed. Getting the first
step correct, making the right judgment call in determining the
value of what we’re doing, is critical.
Avoiding Busywork
If required, most of us can provide justification for what we’re
doing. Even if those tasks that currently occupy our time are not
on a critical path within our most important project, we can find
enough reasons for continuing to do them to satisfy ourselves.
Usually. After all, we are professionals, and we understand better
than anyone else what our jobs require.
However, the key to changing our behavior—to stop spend-
ing time on busywork and start spending time on more important
tasks—is to recognize our flaws rather than protect them. Our
flaws, in this case at least, are the inability to fully understand our
goals, translate those goals into tasks, and prioritize those tasks
in a logical way to accomplish the goals. This is easy to accept in
theory, but much more difficult to execute in practice.
That’s because other demands interrupt our schedules and lay
waste to our plans. There are telephone calls to return and e-mail
messages to deal with, colleagues’ requests, and minor or major
fires to extinguish depending on what stage our projects are in. We
may find ourselves well on the way to accomplishing important
work only to be ambushed by minor concerns and insignificant
duties, so that at the end of the day, we feel tired but unsatisfied
with the previous eight hours of frenzied activity.
If busywork is the problem, then eliminating busywork will
make us more productive, correct? Not necessarily. We may be
engaged in busywork because we are unable or unwilling to accom-
plish important tasks. And we may be just as unable to accomplish
important tasks, for whatever reason, even without busywork. In
that case, busywork is not the problem, but may be the symptom
of a different problem.
B U S Y O R P R O D U C T I V E?