A Paradox of Being Busy

This is a great thought. How many of us do like to tell other people that we're busy?

I am in the first row, of course, always bragging about how busy I am etc. A very much annoying attitude, to be honest.

Some people who don't say directly about how busy they are, also tend to look busy. It could be a sign when they don't focus on what you say or look frequently to their watches and always agree about everything we have said. This is quite ridiculous, but that's one tactic to stop people brag about something irrelevant to their attention at that moment.

We are giving an impression that being busy means we're in demand, more significant or important, and automatically (perhaps) more successful. So, if you are not busy, means either you are not efficient enough, doing something dull (uninspiring) or even don't know exactly what to do.

A paradox of being busy is obvious in my work environment. We could absolutely look very busy and pretend of being busy. This is because the fact that 'the more busy, the more productive the individual' mind set in some managers. The line managers tend to give tasks for certain people who already have so many things in their plate, with an assumption: the individual is more effective (doing the right things) and efficient (doing things right), so he/she could accomplish more tasks. They even have a mental list of some productive people just in case these people could contribute to their new projects in the future. Certainly, this is unhealthy because it could lead to an exhausted employee producing low quality output and causing delay. However, it is another problem when the employee agree with such arrangement.

There is another notion that to pretend of being busy could save us from being a victim of a new task or a new project. When we say we don't have time, then we know actually where our time is, and what shall we do with it, but we are not just interested to add more load, so we tell the manager that we're very busy with other issues. This could be a polite way to say that you're not interested, but then we must be careful with our frequent refusal, because in the future our chance to get some challenging offers is pretty slim. It could harm our long term career development and not to mention about our personal motivation at work.

I think this paradox of busy or pretend to be busy, is much more related to our attitude of complaining about how busy we are. If we don't have any problem about looking busy but still don't say a word about it (which is annoying to some people), then it is considered healthy. Meredith Finemann (2014) in her post has highlighted about using tactics to work smarter to avoid complaining about how busy we are all the time. These tactics are 'constraint the time': focus on the tasks at hand for certain time, 'use scheduler': to use time wisely and always in control of time, and 'cut the fat': cut all unproductive time at work.  

It really depends on how we place ourselves in this situation, but our attitude towards this issue is a big matter.

Pekanbaru,