The misery of busyness
Note: this is a patchwork of experiences and enough time has elapsed that this can be said so as to not single anyone out or hurt anyone’s feelings. This is not specifically about you. The cultural challenges are greater than any individual interaction.
We’ve all been there. The meeting that was derailed before it started, got nowhere, and then ran out of time. This is the misery of busyness.
I’m in the business of [busy-ness]
Let’s take it from the top
The meeting starts. No one is there. You patiently wait as colleague after colleague stumbles in (figuratively)(to the Zoom call or whatever flavour you use). One by one.
All my life, I’ve been searching for something
Something never comes, never leads to nothing
Nothing satisfies but I’m getting close
Closer to the prize at the end of the [meeting?]
Our leaders and key decision-makers flow from meeting to meeting to meeting, becoming progressively more tardy as the day unfolds, slipping in and out of the meeting you’d arranged to unblock a key decision or move along a tough problem that needs worked-through and untangled.
They may be physically (virtually) present, but their attention isn’t. You have a (virtual) room full of people doing something else. But not the thing they’re there for. Everything needs a response. Everything needs to happen now. Except, and paradoxically, excluding, your thing, that’s actually occurring, now.
You’re waiting for five or six people. It’s five-past and three have shown. You’re making small talk, constantly repeating we’ll give it a couple more minutes because the key person you need isn’t there.
You make a start at ten-past, knowing all-to-well you’ll have to start again when they arrive or fill them in at the end of the day when they’re finally out of meetings while you stay late because others can’t manage their diaries.
At 20-past, they burst in. They’re bewildered and confused, a fawn in headlights. They don’t have the context of the last ten minutes, they’re disagreeing and challenging and you repeat the context of the last ten minutes’ discussion only for them to have to rush to the next meeting.
Money trees is the perfect place for shade
You’ve wasted everyone’s time, and the company’s money, and gotten nowhere. But how much does this sound like so many of the meetings we have these days?
You need a couple hours to crack heads together but could only find a slither in peoples’ diaries that wasn’t a month away and you need a decision this week [today] or you’ll be blocked.
But when you do put in long meetings, you get push back. Nobody is available. It’s too long to commit to one meeting. Or, worse, they accept, but the above happens.
So, what am I talking about?
I’ve three hypotheses.
- We’re often busier than we are productive
- This busyness lacks focus and concentration
- We’re inefficiently solving complex problems
The misery of busyness
A jam-packed diary != productivity.
In fact, more often than not, it’s the opposite.
Just like one of my old managers who had FORTY-FOUR THOUSAND UNREAD EMAILS, the misery of busyness can strike anyone.
You dart from meeting to meeting, unsure if you need to be there, what value you’re adding; or worse, just picking up action after action after action while everyone else eats shoots and leaves.
Look, a day or two every so often of extreme busyness is unavoidable if you don’t have a PA to rubber stamp your diary. Sure. But if you’re in 16 meetings a day and working until 11pm and on weekends — No, Everything’s Not Alright, mate.
This isn’t productivity, it’s the misery of busyness, where being busy is harder work than being productive and ultimately colleagues have to work early mornings, late nights and weekends to actually do work.
Attention deficit workplace disorder
There’s a common rallying call in modern workplaces — we need fewer meetings, ahhhhhh!
This is very common from our engineering counterparts who are fed up of being interrupted while in the zone writing code for oftentimes useless meetings.
I agree to a certain extent, insofar as it may reduce the misery of busyness. But there’s two other angles here. First, there’s more to working services than working software — and these need designed. And second, there’s another angle to meetings — they’re quite often unproductive messes!
Even assuming that people actually turn up on time, they’re usually unprepared, they don’t remember what the meeting is for, they’re busy working five other channels or DMs, or are straight up arguing over the weekly shop on WhatsApp with their better half (see anyone staring down through your whole meeting?).
Have we lost the ability to actively listen and partake in the here and now? Has the hyperactivity of the misery of busyness and context switching made it more difficult to be present? I think so.
As soon as something isn’t specifically about someone, many switch off and focus on something else, losing the entirety of the context of the meeting and only engaging in or remembering their part.
Further, due to going from meeting to meeting and having surface level engagement in all of them, on the front end, people don’t have time to prep for meetings and come in informed and raring to go, and on the backend, they’re not able to digest and think and form cohesive thoughts about what’s just happened — and even if they did, the feedback loop is often long (try finding time for a follow-up!) or it’s async (and unfortunately people are still learning how to do this well — yes, it’s a skill!).
To be clear, this isn’t everyone, everywhere, every time. But it’s common enough that it’s a noticeable trend across domains.
You might want to blame remote work for this, too, and I could understand on the surface. But despite my (relative) youth, I have actually worked in many an office — this is not new!
The Director, Head of or Exec who sits furiously typing email after email after email (some of them to YOU) instead of giving respectful attention to the work in the room. The problem is as old as the contemporary workplace itself — was the invent of email the Beginning of the End?
Inefficiency tax
This lack of productivity and hyperactivity makes us woefully inefficient.
Some problems need long-form thought and concentration, they can’t be (efficiently) done in 15 minute increments — and the people doing the work go insane trying to bring it all together.
Don’t get me wrong, that’s not to say that every single meeting should be a three-day away day, either, definitely not!
But you’ve got to think of brains a bit more like a house with central heating.
First, when it’s cold, it needs time to warm up. You’re not really in the context and in the zone within the first 10-30 minutes of a meeting. How many times have you just got to the crux of the issue, everyone’s aligned and there’s great discussion a-brewing, and times-up? How frustrating!
Second, every meeting has different temperature needs — or context and requirements. Too hot from the last meeting? You need time to cool down (and digest) the previous context, then it’s about cranking that thermostat to high again for the next one.
That just describes how we warm up and get into the sweet spot zone for productivity and engagement. There’s going to be overlap between meetings — so if you’ve got 18 x 30 minute meetings between the crack of dawn and dusk, how useful do you think you’re going to be for the people later in the day when you’re still cooling down from four or five meetings ago?
Next — the actual context switching itself. It’s very much hand-in-hand with the ramping up and down above, but is also a discrete bit itself.
A great analogy for this is McDonald’s. Ever wondered why they don’t do breakfast after a hard cut-off time? Context switching. They either do breakfast, or they don’t. Two menus. It’s either one or the other. Maximum productivity and efficiency, limited scope creep or confusion.
How does this manifest in work meetings? Think of it like setting up a work station. Meeting one, you’re rummaging around the back office (your long-term memory) and gathering all the items you need to be productive and valuable in this meeting (promoting the items to quick access short-term memory). Then meeting two comes along and you’ve got spatulas and spoons where you need the drills and screwdrivers.
(Yes, I’ve been context switching analogies.)
So, what do I do?
What a bloody good question!
Is there anything you can do alone? It’s unclear.
The more we all set standards by living them and being engaged and engaging, being prepared and in the room, being active and participatory, the more we can hope to sway things in time as a cultural movement.
But what can you do tomorrow? Probably not too much, it’s a macro cultural challenge.
Though not to leave on a helpless and negative note, here’s a couple suggestions for your meetings at least.
- To mitigate or reduce the misery of busyness — kibosh your diary! Just destroy it. Decline meetings and see what happens. Challenge whether the meeting needs to happen at all. Ultimately, your diary is yours to manage, so back to the image caption, do you control your meetings and manage your diary or do they control you? This is a problem you can solve TODAY. Instead of saying “that could’ve been an email” identify the ones that should be an email and zap them!
- To mitigate or reduce attention deficit workplace disorder — take everyone’s phones and give them to the teacher! Joking, this one’s much harder. But ultimately, this may also come down to some presentation, performance, communication and stakeholder management skills. If you want people to be engaged, unfortunately, you have to also be engaging!
- To limit the inefficiency tax — try actually planning your diary. Remember they used to call them physical booklets ‘planners’? This is a touch sport and you need to be actively engaged in it. Group related activities together, theme different contexts, give yourself time to digest. But most of all, be militant. A gap in the diary isn’t just there to be filled by meetings. BLOCK OUT TIME TO THINK.
- But lastly, and back to the earlier point of solving complex problems — sometimes you just need to push back and actually put in one, two, three, four hour meetings. We need to stop calling them meetings. They’re ‘working sessions’. Participants are there to work. Yes, meetings are a type of work, but they’re the type of work that happens before the actual work happens. Sometimes you just need to do the work in the room. You need active engagement and participation. You need real-time analysis and answers. You need at-point-of-need decisions. Increasing up front investment of efficient working time reduces overall elapsed time.
Oh great, some suggestions, now everything’s solved! Not quite. These are not an elixir, and, unfortunately, these ultimately need to be done by the blockers less the blocked.
You could spend a whole other story on prioritisation but I’ll spare you this time. Ultimately, we need to, as best as we can, reduce elapsed time and increase engaged, focused, concentrated, efficient working time, where we can.
This is how you gain “speed”.
Speed is the enemy of quality progress. Seek responsive, purposeful pace. As one of my favourite quotes goes:
festina lente — make haste, slowly
Post script — this is not a holier-than-thou sermon of how great amar. I have absolutely been the blocker! But the more that people recognise the behaviours they see in others in themselves, the more we can collectively grow and change. This is as much as call to action for me as it is for you (whoever you are)!
