INSIGHTS
Ideas worth thinking about
Being Busy vs Being Useful
I have spent a lot of my life being busy.
I’m pretty sure most of us have.
Busy working.
Busy parenting.
Busy answering messages.
Busy solving problems.
Busy attending meetings.
Busy preparing for meetings about meetings.
Busy making lists.
Busy feeling guilty about the things not yet crossed off those lists.
Being busy can become so normal that we stop questioning it.
And because busy looks like effort, we often assume effort must equal value.
But it doesn’t.
Being busy and being useful are not the same thing.
A person can spend an entire day doing things and still make very little progress on what actually matters.
An organisation can hold meetings all week and still avoid the decision everyone knows needs to be made.
A team can produce report after report without answering the question the report was supposed to help solve.
An employee can respond to every email within five minutes and still spend very little time on meaningful work.
Activity is visible.
Value is not always visible.
That makes busyness strangely seductive.
It gives us evidence that we are doing something.
And sometimes, when we are uncertain about whether we are making a difference, doing more feels safer than asking whether we are doing the right thing.
I think this matters particularly at work.
We often talk about productivity as though the goal is to get more things done.
More of what?
More emails?
More meetings?
More output?
More tasks?
More hours?
Or more value?
The distinction becomes especially important as responsibility increases.
When you’re managing yourself, being busy mainly affects you.
When you’re managing a team, your busyness can become everyone else’s priority.
If the manager responds to everything immediately, everyone learns that everything is urgent.
If the leader attends every meeting, every meeting starts to feel important.
If the organisation rewards activity without examining outcomes, people learn to optimise for activity.
We create the behaviour we repeatedly reinforce.
This doesn’t mean busyness is always bad.
Sometimes there genuinely is a lot to do.
Sometimes a busy season is simply a busy season.
The problem begins when busy becomes the measure of whether we are valuable.
It isn’t.
Your calendar is not your contribution.
Your inbox is not your impact.
Your exhaustion is not proof that you worked hard enough.
And working harder is not automatically the answer when something isn’t working.
Sometimes the answer is clarity.
What are we actually trying to achieve?
What matters most?
What can wait?
What can stop?
What does “done” actually look like?
What is the value of this task?
What would happen if we didn’t do it?
These are not glamorous questions.
But they are useful ones.
And I think useful beats impressive more often than we admit.
Because at the end of a very busy day, the question worth asking isn’t:
“How much did I do?”
It is:
“Did what I do actually matter?”
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