Yup, you're too busy to read this. That's the busyness paradox for you.

I promise you won't regret these 4 minutes! 🤗

Sue Mann

Oct 31, 2024

“How are you?” someone asks.

The most common answers?

“Fine.”

“Busy.”

Or, “Stressed.”

(Also, but less commonly expressed outside of a close relationship, “overwhelmed” or “burnt out”. And even more rarely, “great,” or similar.)

None of those answers tells me how the person really is. (And yes, I know we’re conditioned to think that the question is formulaic, that the other person isn’t really that interested, and so we give the one word answer to get the niceties done with and get to whatever it is we’re really supposed to talk about.)

But I’m not going to pick on “fine” or “stressed” today. And “overwhelmed” I picked on in August. I’m going to pick on “busy” this Halloween day as we come into the last two months of the year, where we feel the pressure to achieve those goals for the year.

The way I hear friends and clients use “busy”, it seems like we’re supposed to nod and commiserate with them—“Yes, this is the way of the world, tsk, tsk”—and yet, also be admiring: “Go you. Look at you being all productive, in demand, needed.”

Busy is both curse. And badge of honor.

We don’t like it. But the idea of saying we’re not busy? Heaven spare us. Now that would imply that we’re unproductive, lazy, unnecessary, superfluous. We might not enjoy busy, but it’s infinitely preferable to being superfluous.

Sometimes, but rarely, people mean “good busy:” they are enjoying what they working on; their days are full, but not too full; they’re feeling valued and useful. All good there.

But most of the time “busy” is short for “bad busy”. “Bad busy” is that overwhelmed feeling. That “I’m always behind, always trying to catch-up on the to-do list, never a moment to catch my breath” busy.

It’s closely related to overwhelm, but where in overwhelm we feel our head actually go below the water line, like we might actually be drowning; with busy our head is still above water (although maybe only barely), we’re not drowning (yet), but we’re not enjoying the swim either. As we find ourselves in deep water, though, swimming is the only option available to us. So we swim. And swim. And swim. And every now and then a boat comes by, or the water gets shallower, and we stop and rest for a bit, and then, we’re back in the deep water. Swimming.

But busyness is a trap.

When we are running from one thing to another, busy, busy, busy, go, go, go, the idea of spending time to figure out how not to be so busy, most especially on something ethereal like “personal development” or “inner work1” seems ludicrous.

(An aside: “I don’t have time for coaching”—another one of those “If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that” lines. Not having time for coaching is probably the exact reason coaching may be a very good idea, just sayin’! Because that’s going to magically solve itself how exactly?)

The thing about busyness is that it blinds us to the very source of our busyness. It’s called the busyness paradox. And here’s how it works.

The busyness paradox

When we’re busy and have that high-octane, panicked feeling that time is scarce… our attention and ability to focus narrows. [We call] this phenomenon “tunneling.” And, like being in a tunnel, we’re only able to concentrate on the most immediate, and often low value, tasks right in front of us…We run around putting out fires all day…[but then get to the end of the day] with the sick realization that we haven’t even started our most important work of the day.
So we stay late at the office, or take work home in the evenings or weekends, and effectively steal time for work away from the rest of our lives. “If you’re in this firefighting state of time pressure and tunneling, you’re not making time to meet long-term goals. You’re not dealing with any of the root causes that led to the firefighting in the first place…the tendency is to do the stuff that’s easy to check off. That’s all you have the bandwidth for.”
Tunneling and busyness are mutually reinforcing…“Focusing on short-term tasks makes you not make strategic plans, which causes you to be busy.”—Preventing Busyness from Becoming Burnout, HBR article by Brigid Schulte

Part of what I like about Schulte’s article so much is that it then goes on to state this:

Ending the busyness cycle may not be something workers can do on our own. The most promising solutions are at the organizational, not the personal, level.” —Brigid Schulte

Yes, you can do that “inner work” to change your relationship to busyness.

But I think too often coaching can reinforce the perception that if we’re stuck in the busyness paradox, if we’re stuck in the tunnel, there’s something wrong with us.

But it’s the environment too, as Schulte says.

So I’ll repeat what I said in “The Overwhelm Epidemic”:

When we are in positions of senior leadership, we need to be very mindful of how our own behaviours are perpetuating the very systems and culture that we say we don’t want. If we, as a senior leader, say “I don’t expect or want you to work on evenings, weekends or on vacation”, but then we send an email at 10pm, or Sunday afternoon, or while we are on vacation, then our behaviour speaks louder than our words…When you have the greater power, you have the greater responsibility to monitor your own behaviour to make sure it is aligned with what you say you value.

Yes, prioritize.

Yes, delegate.

Yes, do your inner work.

Yes, learn to say no.

Yes, time budget.

Yes, build in slack.

But also, look around. Maybe it isn’t you. Maybe it is the environment.

Here are a few ideas for how to create environments where “busy” isn’t equated to value and productivity; where busy is not a badge of honor, but something to be very cautious about.

Reframe Performance Metrics: Shift the focus from face time, hours logged, Slack and email response times, etc. to impact, quality, and long-term outcomes. Reward results that are achieved in a balanced way, not through always-on availability or extra hours worked.
Redefine Urgency Norms: Designate certain hours for focused work, undisturbed by emails, calls, Slack notifications, or meetings. Communicate that to clients too. Define "urgent" more narrowly, so people aren’t conditioned to respond immediately to everything.
Reduce Meetings: Reduce 60 minute meetings to 50 minutes, 30 minute meetings to 25 minutes. You’ll have to hold the line through the discomfort until the new norm establishes itself, but it will if you do. From there you’ll be able to get them down to 45 minutes, 15 minutes…and then maybe even not at all.
Question Meetings: Every meeting has to have a clear purpose. EVERY. MEETING. And there needs to be a very good reason for who is expected to be there. Is this meeting really more important than the other work they are doing? Would a post-meeting summary to them suffice?
Have company-wide meeting free days.
Reward vacations. Reward, celebrate and acknowledge the people who take all their vacation time.
Design in “Slack Time”2. This allows the system to optimize for both efficiency and effectiveness.
Set Boundaries on Communication After Hours: When I was at PricewaterhouseCoopers, they introduced one small change in the email platform: if you hit send and it was after hours, or on the weekend, a warning popped up and it prompted you to schedule the send, rather than send now.
Make Leaders’ “Off Time” Visible. This reduces the “do as I say, not as I do” behaviour that keeps the busyness paradox intact.
Make work-life balance itself be a KPI.

Experiment and start with the small changes, like reducing meeting lengths, or having one half-day week that is organization-wide (and that includes clients!) meeting free time. Expect resistance and time to adjust. Can you make it a game? Can you reward those teams who actually implement ideas/ demonstrate increases in well-being scores?

The only way out of the tunnel of the busyness paradox is by taking the time to do some strategic thinking.

Can you add that strategic planning time to your busy schedule?!

What happens if you don’t?

Building Compassionate Workplaces

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