Why do some people are very busy without being effective?

In our modern ‘always-on’ world, there is a constant demand to be always busy, and to be seen to be busy, responding to everything immediately, and getting tasks done straight away. It can lead to feelings of being overwhelmed.

The economist Cyril Northcote Parkinson, once wrote that “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” Or, to put it another way: workers will increase their efficiencies if they feel there is less time to complete their tasks.

There are four rules for understanding the difference between being busy and being productive:

· Being busy is frantic while being productive is focused.

· Being busy is fueled by perfectionism while being productive is fueled by purpose.

· Being busy is about working harder while being productive is about working smarter.

· Being busy is about being good at everything while being productive is about being great at a few important things

Being productive is less about always having something to do, and more about making sure that what you’re doing is propelling you toward a goal. Busy people stay busy for the sake of it. Productive people work with purpose and intent.

How To Go From Busy To Productive

Since being productive is all about being more intentional with your time, one of the best ways to go from busy to productive is to learn to prioritize the tasks on your to-do list. For this, a prioritization framework can really help.

The Eisenhower Matrix

Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously said, “What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.” That’s the basis for the Eisenhower Decision Matrix, an extremely popular prioritization tool.
For this, create four boxes on two axes — one going from important to not important, and the other going from urgent to not urgent. Here’s a template you can use:

This gives you four boxes where you can list your tasks:

· Urgent and important. These are tasks you should do right away. They help you work toward goals, and they’re time-sensitive.

· Example: Completing a report that’s due at the end of the week and is necessary for a large work project to move forward.

· Not urgent, but important. These are tasks that will help you work toward goals, but that don’t have a deadline attached. Work on these once your urgent and important tasks are finished.

· Example: Doing deep work or research on a major project that’s impactful, but doesn’t have an exact deadline.

· Urgent, but not important. This is where most people spend most of their time. These tasks should be delegated to someone else, or eliminated entirely.

· Example: Answering emails and phone calls, checking social media notifications, responding to coworkers who stop by your desk.

· Not urgent or important. These are tasks that should be removed from your to-do list. They don’t contribute to any larger goals and they aren’t time sensitive. Strike them off the list and move on.

· Example: Uploading photos to social media, or calling a friend to catch up.

Most people spend most of their time in the third quadrant of the Eisenhower Matrix: doing tasks that are urgent, but not important. The goal of using the matrix is to become more aware of the impact of all your tasks and spend more time in the first two quadrants, always doing work that’s important, and prioritizing it according to its urgency.

Signs Someone Is Busy, Not Efficient

Busy people tend to work on things just for the sake of working on them — without working toward a larger goal. To be as productive as possible, as many tasks as possible should be helping you move closer to a goal. In fact, the most productive people set long-term goals, and then break those down into smaller, short-term goals they can work toward on a daily basis.

Busy people, on the other hand, tend to treat everything on their to-do list like an important priority. This divides their focus — and their impact — so that although they spend a lot of time working, they make little progress toward any end goal.

Busy people often struggle with saying “yes” to everything. They’re eager to jump in, excited to help. Productive people, on the other hand, know how to say no to unimportant tasks so they can prioritize what matters. They also know how to delegate urgent-yet-unimportant tasks to others so they can focus on their bigger goals.

A big piece of the productivity puzzle is time management. Busy people may feel like they have less time in the day, but the truth is that they tend to waste time, rather than maximize their productivity. Procrastination is often a problem for busy people — even if they’re constantly working, they tend to put off harder, more important work in favor of unimportant tasks.

Busy people give in to distractions, while productive people minimize them.

Ways to Be More Productive, Not Just Busy

1. The Pareto Principle states that 20 percent of our efforts generate 80 percent of results. This might not be the gospel truth in terms of an exact percentage to apply in all cases, but it does make a valid point that much of what we do on a day-to-day basis does not contribute to or has very little impact on the results we want to achieve. The problem is that most of us haven’t taken the time to think What is the 20 percent of what I do that creates the results I want? Even if we don’t know the answer, it’s often worth finding out — especially in a start-up, where time is a scarce resource for the founders and their team.

Instead, we tend to overwhelm ourselves with doing too much at once. And when we overload our plate, unfortunately, we lack the focus to perform at our peak. Find the few really important things that you should focus on each day or week and the activities that create the greatest results, then delegate the rest or ignore them. It frees up energy and brainpower to focus on the tasks that produce results while avoiding procrastination or burnout.

2. How many of us start our days focused on what needs to get done and then get completely swept away by a whirlwind?

Most of our workdays are filled with unexpected, urgent, and routine tasks that will keep us from doing anything new. These tasks are called the whirlwind. The key to being productive is not being constantly blown off course by the whirlwind.

If we have our important goals and the activities we know that we need to do to create results, we need to make sure that we spend a portion of our time each day taking consistent steps towards those goals. The whirlwind is often not as urgent as we think it is. Learn to be more discerning about what classifies as urgent, what’s important, and what’s simply not important or time-critical.

3. Neuroscience studies into how the brain works suggest that every time we switch tasks (what we might traditionally call multi-tasking), it’s “expensive” for us in terms of lost time and productivity. For example, have you ever been in a Zoom meeting and tried to write an email or send a message at the same time? We might not think that this is a big deal, but over the course of a day, the cumulative effect is that we lose around 40 percent of our productivity. If we are trying to do a complicated task that requires concentration, it means we’re more likely to make errors and lose even more time in the switching process.

4. The brain is not designed to be on 24/7. By allowing ourselves time off, or slow time, we allow ourselves time to be creative and innovative, which are qualities essential to run a long-term, relevant business. We need to have that free flow of ideas, and it is also better to approach problems in a creative way to produce a creative solution, rather than from a stressed, anxious state.

Allowing slow thinking time by going for a walk or meditating, for example, gets you into a relaxed state, which gets you into a mental state that’s the most open to new ideas and solutions.

But after all that, there could be 5% of people who are extra-ordinary doing skillfully four or five tasks simultaneously.

Resources

1.https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/paretoprinciple.asp#:~:text=%20Pareto%20Principle%20%201%20Understanding%20the%20Pareto,the%20Pareto%20Principle.%20Simply%2C%20it%20can...%20More%20

2.https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0096-3445.124.2.207