Smart Work

PART I CENTRALISE YOUR ACTIONS

Busyness is a mindset. Or to paraphrase Peter Cook, author of The New Rules of Management, busyness is an emotional response to our schedule. We feel busy when our schedule or task list is full. When someone asks us how we are we respond instinctively: ‘Busy’.

But what does this really mean? Are we not always busy with something? Yes, of course we will have pressure points when major deadlines loom, or when a project is in full swing, but these particularly busy times seem to have become the norm. There are fewer and fewer gaps between our busy periods, which for many have joined up into one never-ending busy period. The only thing that changes is the content of this week's crises, deliverables or urgent deadlines.

This sense of busyness is fuelled by the urgency that pervades our modern workplace, and often this is a self-perpetuating problem. The systems and tools we use to organise our actions make us feel busier than we actually are. I believe systems that may have worked in a less frantic workplace 20 years ago are now a part of the problem.

A client I worked with recently came to this conclusion in a training session. A typically busy senior manager in a health organisation, he was desperate for help to get on top of a full meeting schedule and an overflowing inbox. His strategy for managing emails was simply to let them pile up while ...