We
live in a time-pressed culture. There is never enough time. And we
see it, we feel it around us every day. We live in a world that valorizes work, accomplishment, and
busyness. And there’s a real upside to that; there’s real
value. We’re pushed, We’re driven toward achievement and action and creation. And
that’s great.
But
there’s also a downside. And that's something that I think is worth
talking about. There was a study done a while back, by the Management
Research Group, of 10,000 senior leaders. And they asked them, “What is key to your organization’s
success?” And 97 percent said long-term strategic
thinking. I mean, when was the last time
that 97 percent of people agreed on anything? There is near unanimity that
being a long-term thinker -- having perspective, having the ability
to think and ask big questions -- is essential to our success.
And yet in a separate study, 96
percent of leaders were surveyed, and they said they don’t have time for strategic thinking. What is
going on? Why is it -- how can it be that 96 percent of people
are not doing the one thing that they say is most critical to their
success?
Well, I think we know the answer
… or at least we think we do. The average professional attends 62 meetings per month. That sounds
pretty outrageous. How could that be? But if you break it
down, it’s not that many. It’s two to three meetings per
day, which is probably average for many of you. So 62 meetings a
month. That does not help, and that is not wrong. It is a
contributor.
A study a while back by
McKinsey showed that the average professional spends 28 percent of their time just
responding to email. Of course that drains us, of course, that makes
us busy. But the truth is, it’s also, I believe, not the full
picture. Those are manifestations. Those are problems,
legitimately. But there are also some other things going on underneath the
surface, reasons that perhaps we are, in some ways, working at
cross-purposes.
Because for so long almost all of
us have said we want desperately to be less busy, and yet we keep making
choices that put us in the position where we’re just as busy as we’ve
always been. What is going on? Well, some research out of Columbia University sheds
a little bit of light on this. Silvia Bellessa and her colleagues
have done interesting research into the fact that in some cultures
-- American culture chief among them -- busyness is a form of
status. When we say, “Oh, I am so crazy busy,” what we’re saying is
a societally-accepted version of “I am so important -- “I am so popular! I
am so in demand!” And the truth is that feeling can be
hard to give up ... even if we say that we want to. That’s not the only reason,
of course. It turns out it is very hard for
the human mind to deal with conditions of uncertainty.
And in modern life, there’s a lot of
it. Sometimes we are given tasks or challenges, and the truth is, tactically,
we just don’t know how to do it. “Increase
sales by 30 percent.” Well,
how? There’s a lot of ways you could do it. You’re
not sure how. Sometimes it’s easier, frankly, to just double down and keep
doing more of what you’re already doing. That might not be the best answer, but
it’s an answer, and it removes uncertainty. The picture gets even worse when
we’re talking about existential questions; when
we’re talking about uncomfortable matters that we might not want to deal with. That
might be, “Am I in the right job?” It
might be, “Am I in the right career?” Those are often questions, truth be told, we might not want the answer to. And
so we become busy as a way so that we don’t even have to ask the question.
Now, there's a third reason, and I’ll admit it’s one that I know
well, personally, and that is that sometimes we use busyness as a way to numb
ourselves out. I’ve experienced that. This
is my boy Gideon, and he died in 2013. I’d had him for 17 years, and he was my best friend. And after he died, I’ll
be honest, I didn’t want to be home because I knew that he wouldn’t be there. And so for two years, my
life was an Uber to an airport, to a hotel, and back
again, because I just really didn’t want to face that. For a lot of us, there
are things we sometimes don’t want to face. What we’re looking for with work is
an anesthetic. And as I like to say, work is better than crack -- so if you’re
choosing ... it’s not the worst. But the truth is, it's also not a sustainable
solution.
For many of us, we get trapped in the
pattern of busyness, of overwork. It's hard sometimes even to remember what it
was like before. Oftentimes in our mind’s eye, when we think of busyness, what
we think of is this. What we think of is triumphant success and the world at
your fingertips. The truth is, more often, busyness looks like this. It looks
like loneliness.
It looks like frustration. It looks like having a life that’s not really in
your full control. So I would like to propose that we make a change. Because if
we are ever going to succeed in beating back busyness once and for all, first
of all, we have to get real and acknowledge what is actually behind some of the
busyness that is filling our days. We have to get honest about what it is
that’s motivating us so that we can make a different choice. Because it is
about our choice. We need to recognize that real
freedom is about creating the space so that we
can breathe, the space so that we can think. Ultimately, real freedom is about
choosing how and with whom we want to be spending our time.
