“I’m sooo busy!” We’ve all said it.
Our response when asked how we’ve been or what we’ve been up to. “I’m great, but OMG, I’ve been so busy.” We’re all juggling a million things at any moment. From work to kids to hobbies, everyone’s busy.
Yet some people wear their busyness like a badge of honor, thinking that busyness equals productivity or success, but that’s not often the case.
What is Busyness?
We know what it means to be busy. Busy is defined as engaged in action and being in use. Busy differs from our definition of busyness. Busyness is the facade of having a lot to do with minimal progress or effort toward accomplishing your goals. Your to-do list is a mile long, and there’s a lot on your metaphorical plate, but you’re not doing anything to make your load any lighter.
As a communications professional, there are many days I feel swamped, but then I end the day wondering what I actually accomplished. Often, I spend hours in my email working through urgent communications and other timely requests. I don’t have the luxury of dedicated downtime away from what many consider a time stuck, and the result is many days where busyness gets the best of me. I feel like I did a lot, even though my growing to-do list would say otherwise.
How Busyness is Different from Productivity
Many people are proud to state their busyness, believing that it represents importance, success, and productivity. But in fact, busyness is only the perception of work. It’s the feeling and state of having a lot to do without producing results.
Society has led us to believe that busyness is better. Falsely implying that the busier you are, the more successful you are in your career, thus more valuable and essential than others. It’s assumed that if you’re not busy, you’re lazy and unmotivated. While it’s easy to fall into this trap, it’s not true because busyness is all about mindset.
When you fall into the thinking that busyness equals success, you’re more likely to feel unaccomplished at work, even if you’re making strides on your to-do list and growing in your career. You may begin working more hours to appear busy and show your coworkers that you’re dedicated to your responsibilities. But this is only for show. The appearance of busyness is not the same as actually having a large workload. Busyness is not the key to success; rather, it’s how productive you are that will get you to where you want to be in your career.
How Busyness Causes Burnout
Being busy can be a distraction from meeting your goals. That constant state of feeling like you have a lot to do can wreak havoc on your mental and physical health. At a time when we’re more connected than ever and our brains are running a mile a minute, this multitasking leads to fragmentation.
Fragmentation is where we break our work into small, minimal tasks. For example, you’re working on a report, but then you get an email, so you switch tasks to answer that email, and then before you know it, it’s three hours later, and you haven’t returned to working on your report because of all of the other, less critical tasks that have popped up.
Busyness equals increased stress and anxiety, which impacts our wellbeing and can lead to more severe issues like burnout. In a 2016 survey from Pew Research Center, 52 percent of Americans said they’re usually trying to do two or more things at once. In a later study in 2018, 60 percent of U.S. adults said they sometimes felt too busy to enjoy life.
Burnout became more widely recognized when the World Health Organization (WHO) included it in the 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) as an occupational phenomenon in 2019. The WHO defines burnout as a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.
Burnout is characterized by three dimensions:
- Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion
- Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job
- A sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment
It’s important to note that the WHO recognizes burnout as a phenomenon specifically in the occupational context. While the effects can be felt in other areas of your life, burnout should not be applied to describe those experiences outside of the workplace.
In a Deloitte survey on workplace burnout, 77 percent of respondents said they’ve experienced employee burnout at their current job, with more than half citing more than one occurrence. We’re all living in this hustle culture where there’s a higher value placed on those who have drive than those with leisure time. Using busyness as a symbol of status is literally killing us. We’re exhausted, we’re burned out, and it’s time we stop.
The Difference Between Busyness and Real Work
Busyness makes us feel productive without actually being productive. It puts us in a busyness mindset where we feel "go go go" with little to show for it. The key difference between being busy and actually getting work done is in one instance, you feel busy while in the other, you actually are.
For example, I love a good to-do list. Every day before I start working, I write down everything I have on my plate that needs to get done. On the days where I write twenty things down on my list, I realistically accomplish maybe three or four. While I feel extremely busy (and my to-do list tells me I am), I also feel very overwhelmed.
But on the days where I have a long to-do list, and I prioritize three tasks that I absolutely need to get done that day, I usually end up knocking out six or seven. By setting realistic expectations for myself, I’m actually busy without just feeling busy.
It’s common to get trapped in busyness. We all have jobs to do, and we’re all critical to the success of our team. Our companies found our work meaningful enough to dedicate an entire position to it, and we’re all pulled in ten different directions on any given day. But it’s not serving our careers to fall into the busyness trap.
According to a University of California Irvine study, it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to a task after a distraction. This means that anytime we get an email and stop what we’re doing to look at it or anytime we get an instant message from a coworker, our time is filled with refocusing our attention to the task at hand. While this feeling of busyness can lead you to believe you’re doing a lot, it doesn’t produce results.
Busyness doesn’t benefit you or your company. It doesn’t serve us in our careers, and it’s not helping us make progress toward our goals or expand our experience and expertise. So it’s time to stop appearing like we’re busy and start putting our heads down and getting to work. If you’re not sure what that looks like, here are a few examples of the difference between busyness and real work.
Example 1 of Busyness Versus Real Work
Busyness: You have plans to focus on a big project, but your email is nonstop all day. You end up getting sucked into replying to non-urgent emails for hours and only get a fraction of the work done on the project you wanted to accomplish.
Real Work: You have plans to focus on a big project. You know your email can be distracting. You make a plan to check it periodically throughout the day and only respond to urgent messages that require an immediate response. This allows you to keep your head clear and prioritize your project.
Example 2 of Busyness Versus Real Work
Busyness: Every morning, you write everything you have to get done that day and week in your planner. Some days this amounts to 10 to 20 tasks. You feel overwhelmed and don’t know where to start. You end up spending the day flip-flopping between tasks and only fully accomplishing one or two.
Real Work: Every morning, you write everything you have to get done in your planner. You like to get everything out of your head and down on paper, and most days, it adds up to an exorbitant amount of tasks. To prioritize and mitigate stress, you identify the top three must get done items of the day. This empowers you to complete these three tasks and sometimes start on the remainder of your list.
Example 3 of Busyness Versus Real Work
Busyness: You’re working on a big project that requires a lot of cross-department collaboration. You’re excited because it’s going to provide you with a lot of exposure to senior-level professionals at your company. To move the needle, you set up a full day of meetings to discuss the project plan and next steps. The meetings become more like networking conversations. The little time you have between meetings is spent checking emails, but you don’t have enough time to respond. You end the day exhausted and with not much more info to work on your project than you started it with.
Real Work: The project that you’re working on requires a lot of cross-department collaboration. You need to schedule a lot of meetings with senior-level professionals to help move the project forward. You strategically schedule the meetings to allow yourself time throughout the day to work on other items. You prepare an agenda for each meeting, so you have a clear objective for each discussion while still allowing some time to network. You leave each meeting with exactly what you need to move the project along.
