I just started following Ted Roosevelt V on Twitter, and part of his bio reads, “Working hard on work worth doing.”
If you’re like me, the small signs of Spring give energy and hope, and I inevitably start a long list of new projects. But Ted Roosevelt’s bio sparked my thinking: Is my list just busy work or work worth doing? What if great things can be accomplished without a lot of churn and flurry? We’ll look at how you can use soft skills to improve your productivity in the March series, Work Worth Doing.
First up, I don’t know anyone who thinks that being busy is all it’s cracked up to be. However, no matter how much you agree, that idea can be hard to practice in our loud, complicated world. So, let me tell you how a former manager helped change my perspective when I pushed back about the value of “busy.”
Time and again, I would give my patient manager Griffin a mile-a-minute download for a complicated project, thinking he had to know all the little details to get the full picture. The first few emergencies, he helped identify the answer. But one day, Griffin stopped to ask a game-changing question: “What’s the one thing that will make a difference?”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “There isn’t one thing—we need to address everything!”
“Yeah, I get that,” Griffin said, tilting his head, “But everything you’re describing can’t have the same level of importance. It’s kind of like an old shed I had torn down. The contractor didn’t take off 50 pieces of lumber. He took the roof off, then the door, then he pushed the frame for 30 seconds until the whole thing came tumbling down. What’s one problem you can solve that will bring everything else together?”
I learned an important lesson that day: Mindlessly juggling more, more, more isn’t valuable. In fact, trying to do too much at once made me scattered and irritable—can you relate?
What’s the busy work that gets in your way—the one big problem that, if you solve it, could make a huge difference? For instance, do you need to redirect the forceful person who derails important deadlines because they always want to be your #1 on your To Do list? Can you lighten up your email, text, and instant message boxes by changing your goal from answering as fast as possible to answering with meaning? Or do you need to block out 30 minutes to get your facts in order so a difficult conversation might go a little easier?
Put down the balls you’re trying to juggle all at once and start knocking them off, one by one—that’s work worth doing. Ask if you’re solving the right problems in the right sequence. Understand what you’re getting yourself into before you say an instant yes to a new opportunity. And perhaps put a post in your Drafts folder for ten minutes while you cool down and think it through.
Here are three ways you can use the soft skill of discernment to detach from the idea that busy is better:
The next time you feel pushed and pulled by too many details, take charge of your day, and remind yourself, “Busy isn’t better.”