I’m up to my eyeballs with work. I’ve got too many irons in the fire. I’m trying to stop all these plates from spinning out of control. My plate is full. I’m overloaded. When you hear or read these phrases, do they conjure up in your mind thoughts of peace, calm, a balanced schedule, life, or reasonable workload? No? I didn’t think so. You probably are thinking just the opposite. Maybe words like hectic, frenetic, frenzied, frustrated, fatigue or exhausting, is what came to mind.

Are you busy? Yes? That’s too bad. A dictionary definition of busy is full of, characterized or crowded by activity. To keep occupied. Other words that are synonyms for busy include: slaving, swamped, snowed, and an interesting and very telling phrase “in someone else’s possession.”

Yeah, I get it, you’re busy, but are you productive? Busyness and productivity are not the same. In fact, often busyness is a barrier to productivity. Busy work can be a proxy for real work, preventing us from accomplishing our goals and objectives. Recently, I noticed with a team that I regularly engage with, that for a particular task more than a dozen emails over a period of two days were exchanged back and forth talking about the task, clarifying the task, determining who was responsible for the task, pushing the task to someone else and so on. Two full workdays were spent talking about the task, when a five-minute phone call could have resolved the issue and the task would have taken no more than ten minutes at the most to accomplish, which is exactly what happened when I intervened. Multiple personnel and unnecessary work hours were spent on a ten-minute project. This example I believe plays out millions upon millions of times per week in both small and large companies alike.

Busy work rather than focused productive work seems to dominate much of the workplace resulting in fragmented workdays, longer hours, less productivity, and a decline in focused work, resulting in a workforce that is too often simply spinning its wheels. We don’t need to work harder or longer hours, including weekends. We need to work smarter more effectively and efficiently. One of the main culprits causing busy work are distractions, with E-mail being perhaps the worst. Every time you respond to the “ding” of an email notification you become distracted, attention to the work at hand comes to a screeching halt and it happens fifty, sixty, or more times each day creating an attention deficit and reducing the amount of real work that gets done.

Understanding roles and responsibilities, establishing clear communication channels, effective processes and efficient workflows will certainly cut down on busyness. Changing and modifying how we engage with technology is also a good place to look. Identifying and eliminating distractions will help guide your team toward more times of focused work. Giving team members the flexibility to carve out focused time in their work schedule each day will do wonders for productivity, increase worker satisfaction, reduce stress, improve morale, and create a culture of execution.

Perhaps it’s time to evaluate and do an audit of your work week. Be honest with yourself and your co-workers. Identify areas that have you looking more like a circus clown trying to keep plates spinning in the air hoping they don’t come crashing to the ground, rather than a well-organized, high functioning team. Look at processes and workflows that might be negatively impacting you and your team resulting in fatigue leading to potential burnout. Replace them with clear communication channels, and streamlined workflows that create a healthy work culture that “knocks it out of the park.”

This matter of busyness isn’t just something to look at in the workplace, it is also a good exercise consider in your personal and family life as well.

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