Busy Work vs. Actual Work
By Poornima Vijayashanker Recently a young woman named Margaret reached out and asked me for some guidance regarding her business. So I took the …
By Poornima Vijayashanker
Recently a young woman named Margaret reached out and asked me for some guidance regarding her business. So I took the time to walk through her product, and then did a deep dive into the numbers behind her business as it related to customers, revenue, expenses, etc.
Before I sat down to give her any advice, I asked Margaret what she wanted, and her response was to scale her business. She wanted more. More customers and revenue.
And she wanted to make it happen in the next six month, that was her goal.
I said OK, and proceeded to give her some specific advice on how she needed to change her product, and suggested some marketing experiments. But every time I gave her a suggestion she shot it back at me with an excuse.
Finally, I just got tired of her pushback, and told her, “This is just my feedback, ultimately you can do what you want, it’s your business after all. I will not be offended if you don’t follow any of this. After all you have more depth of knowledge in this business than me. I’m just telling you what I see.”
I think she got my point, and started to come around. Margaret finally admitted that what was really holding her back from considering my suggestions was that she just didn’t have time.There were other things she was working on related to the business, and while she admitted they were less important she felt like she needed to get them done.
That’s when I realized what was going on in Margaret’s head. She had a disconnect between what constituted as work that she needed to be doing to build the business, and just getting things done to feel like she was being “productive”.
This is a classic mistake many of us make, I know I’ve been guilty of it too!
My vice is that I LOVE to clean, and sometimes instead of overlooking a modestly messy office I will spend time organizing everything until it’s pristine. When I could have just lived with it for a little bit longer and focused on doing more sales calls!
But I have learned the hard way that being too busy makes it hard to meet goals and bring dreams to reality.
How do we reconcile this?
First we have to consciously take a look at our task list and cross things off that either don’t matter or can wait. Like me and cleaning…
Second, we need to get a deep understanding of cause and effect when it comes to achieving our goals. For example, if you are running a business and want more customers (goal or effect), then you’ve gotta do some sales and marketing (cause). But it’s not enough to call up thousands of people, you’ll once again just be doing busy work. To be effective you need to understand the process for prospecting, dig into what channels your customers maybe hanging out on, then come up with a plan, and try running some experiments.
Why do we gravitate towards the busy work or staying busy?
There are two reasons:
1. At the end of the day we want to feel accomplished.
It’s easier to feel accomplished if you can see results. When I see a clean desk I know I’ve done something. But I don’t always see results when I’ve spent the day coming up with a sales plan or making 200 phone calls! Instead I might feel rejected by the people on the calls and lose motivation. This is why a lot of people like to stay busy doing other things, they feel like they’re accomplishing something, but if you dig in a little deeper they’re just not using their time effectively.
2. It’s hard to know if your efforts are making progress.
You might be doing a lot, but if you really want to know that you’re being effective, you have to track the numbers across all the things you’re doing. I learned that it wasn’t enough to do 200 phone calls, I also needed to do some follow ups, answer questions, and keep at it for a few weeks or months before I got a sale! And if at any time things weren’t working, I knew I needed change up my process, not just blame the lack of success on it.
Remember that you cannot expect to hit a goal by doing unrelated things. You’ve got to think about your approach to hitting a goal and the steps, tasks,or activities you’re doing to achieve it. Finally, realize that number of hours of effort does not translate into results!
Did you recently realize that you were sinking hours into a project or doing work that was unrelated? What was it, and what made you realize that you were stuck doing busy work?
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