263: Why are we so busy (and what to do about it)

Transcript

Aoife O’Brien [00:00:00]:

Why are we all so busy all the time? I don’t think it’s something new. I think it’s something that has been around for quite a while. It really hit home for me when I was trying to meet up with a friend and she said, but you’re always so busy. And I thought, wow, like, I can’t make time for my friends. What’s going on? Something really needs to change. So today’s episode is all about that. The reasons behind why we are so busy, but also, what can we do about it. You’re listening to the Happier at Work podcast.

Aoife O’Brien [00:00:32]:

This is the career and culture podcast for leaders, especially those in global organisations. I’m your host, Aoife o’ Brien, and I’m not, definitely not, preaching from the pulpit. This is something I struggle with all the time as well, and I need constant reminders about it. Now, before I go into this, I’d love to know, do you want me to share this on a masterclass? Because I’ve been running masterclasses for the first few months of the year. I’ve done five so far. @ the time of this recording, I’m happy to turn this into a masterclass, something that you can get individualized insights on. I was also toying with the idea of turning those masterclasses into something a little bit more intimate, something a bit more like a round table so people can share their own experiences, but also I can share my insights. And like, these are some frameworks to use, but then we talk openly about how to use those in our work.

Aoife O’Brien [00:01:26]:

Do let me know if either of those things is something that would be of interest. I’d absolutely love to do something like that. Something I thought about before I started recording this today was this idea, like we talk about time management, and then probably about five or six years ago, I started thinking more about energy management. So it’s not necessarily about time management. It’s thinking about the levels of energy you have to give to the work that you do. So, for example, on a Monday, I’m feeling a bit more energized after the weekend. So Monday is the time for strategic planning, for deep focus work. Friday, it’s the end of the week.

Aoife O’Brien [00:02:06]:

I’m feeling a little bit tired, you know, and maybe I don’t want to have any meetings that day. That’s the day for admin. So thinking more along those lines, and I’ve always been fascinated in this idea of when is the best time to do specific types of work. But beyond that, and like I said before I started recording this today I started thinking about perception management. So thinking about how we perceive ourselves, but also how other people perceive us as well, and the impression that we’re giving out to the world. And maybe this has something to do with why we’re so busy all the time. So we want to seem really important. So we’re putting out this perception that we’re so important because we’re so busy all the time.

Aoife O’Brien [00:02:48]:

And, you know, we use busyness as a badge of honor. I’ve heard that so many times. But it’s, I suppose for me, getting into the psychology behind it, like what’s really going on there? And if you’re a leader and you’re struggling with feeling like you’re busy, and I think we can all relate to this, then it’s thinking about what you can do. So why are we so busy? But then what can we do? Because I’m including myself in this. I need to learn these lessons, I need to apply them again and again. I need to remember them. But how can we reclaim our time, our energy, but also the impact that we want to have on the world? So thinking about it from that perspective. So I’ll go through the reasons, first of all, like, why are we so busy? And then beyond why, what can we actually do about it? And I think another thing, again, this might be an episode, like a completely separate topic.

Aoife O’Brien [00:03:43]:

And again, this might be a completely separate podcast episode. But it’s this idea of, yeah, we know what to do, but we’re not actually doing it. And how do we move from the knowing into the actual implementation and the execution and the doing of it? So how do we bridge the gap between knowing and doing? It’s something I’ve talked about before. I’m not sure if I’ve done a full podcast episode on it. It certainly has come up in convers. But if that, again, if that’s something that’s interesting to you, absolutely, let me know. So the first why, why are we so busy? Is because business is so glorified, especially in organisations. And if I think back to when I worked in corporate, the more meetings you were in, and especially if you’re in these back to back meetings or in a meeting all day, the perception is that you’re really important, you’re important enough to be invited to those meetings.

Aoife O’Brien [00:04:39]:

And I must say, for this episode, this is my take on it. But if you haven’t checked out Lisa Bodell’s episode, which was released earlier this year, she has some brilliant insights about these kinds of things, like uninviting people to meetings being a badge of honour as opposed to the opposite. Like, I got invited to this important meeting, so therefore I must be so important. But for me, this idea of busyness means it’s performative. It’s not about the impact that you’re having, it’s about the visibility that you have by being in these meetings, by looking like you’re busy, by looking like you’re working all of these long hours. So reframing that to think about what impact is this that I want to have? And we’ll come on to that when we come to the what to do about it. This also coincides with being always on. For a long time I didn’t have my emails on my phone because I didn’t need to have them on my phone.

Aoife O’Brien [00:05:35]:

And then I wanted to check an email and I didn’t want to open my laptop. So I was like, right, I’m going to put my emails back on my phone now. For me, that actually worked. That was okay because I’m just checking if there’s one email that I’m expecting, I don’t have to go and open my laptop. So that’s great. But we are constantly available, Whether it’s through WhatsApp, whether it’s through email, and we can be constantly interrupted as well when we’re trying to do deep and focused work. And so this always on culture leaves us feeling like we’re really drained at the end of the day.

Aoife O’Brien [00:06:09]:

Like we have done so many different things, but actually that feeling is because we’ve been doing lots and lots of different things or we’ve been interrupted throughout the day and we haven’t necessarily had the impact that we want to have. We haven’t necessarily ticked things off our task list or however it is that you manage things. Slight side note here, I’ve heard people talking more and more about results lists and impact lists rather than having a task list. I’m still very much on the task list, but I’ve started an upgrade of a technology that I’m using to manage the tasks that I have, and I’m linking all of those back to goals, which helps me to clarify, okay, why is it that I’m actually doing this? What is this connected to in my business? And how can, you know, how can this actually improve things? And again, you know, at the end, I’m going to share an insight that I had earlier and share that at the end of the episode about, you know, what can we actually do? How can we question things a Little bit better. So number three then is the urgency versus the importance of things. And we tend to focus on those who shout loudest, on the email that comes in with urgent, we need to put out this fire. So whoever’s shouting the loudest, and we tend to focus on those urgent tasks as if they are the priority, rather than carving out time for important work and carving out separate time then to manage those urgent requests which oftentimes are not urgent. And let’s face it, I’m not, you know, I’m not saving lives with the work that I do.

Aoife O’Brien [00:07:52]:

And I’m sure a lot of people who are listening today are also not saving lives. There will be some who are, but a lot of people who are listening today are not. They’re not saving lives. So why does it have to be so urgent? You know, thinking about the urgent versus the important tasks that you need to do. Number four is that we say yes too much. We say yes maybe when we want to say no. We say yes because we feel obliged. We feel yes because we owe someone a favor or because we don’t know how to say no, or because we’re a total and other people pleaser or a perfectionist, or we want to prove our worth in some way and we say yes.

Aoife O’Brien [00:08:32]:

Now, again, going back to Lisa Bodell’s episode she talked about, it’s not no, it’s yes, if, so yes if. And the if is if we can reprioritise everything else that I have on my list here. Now, from a leader’s perspective, and you will know this as a leader yourself, but from a leader’s perspective, we don’t often know all of the day to day things that people have on their to do list. We don’t know everything that they have. We don’t know how long it takes. I know certainly for me, as soon as I delegate something, I have a tendency to forget exactly, exactly how long it might take or how important it might be or when it needs to be done. And it’s easy. So if you think about your leaders and if they’re coming to you with something extra, it’s easy for them also to forget everything that you have on your plate.

Aoife O’Brien [00:09:23]:

So it’s okay to push back on these things. It’s okay to say no. It’s okay to protect your time, to protect your energy, to want to have this bigger impact, to want to understand why is it that we’re reprioritising these things. Then number five is broadly speaking, imposter. Syndrome. So we wrap up our worth in what we perceive to be productivity. What we perceive to be this stuff that I produce or me being an overachiever is so related to my identity that I can’t possibly slow down, I can’t possibly take the foot off the pedal. I have to keep producing in this way because you know what, if I don’t, then they’re going to realise that I’m not up to the job, that I’m a total fraud and I don’t deserve to be where I am.

Aoife O’Brien [00:10:17]:

And so this underlying fear causes us to stay busy and to keep working. There’s another thing that I found so insightful that I came across a number of years ago from Dori Clark. And since then I have been following her and she is incredible. From a thought leadership perspective, I just think she is amazing. I had the fantastic opportunity to meet her in person last year in Dublin and she’s every bit as amazing in person as she comes across online. She’s just amazing. All of that

Aoife O’Brien [00:11:03]:

to say, the thing that really stuck with me when I saw, I think it was like a 10 minute TEDx talk and I will put a link to that in the comments because for me it was very impactful. She talked about like, why are we busy? But one of those things that she talked about is because it feels good, it feels really good to be busy. And if we’re trying to avoid something, then being busy at work is a great way to avoid our feelings. If there’s something happening at home, if there’s something that we’re not addressing in ourselves, burying ourselves in work is a really great way to avoid that. And it feels good. It feels like we’re being productive even though secretly and subconsciously we’re actually avoiding something a little bit deeper. So I thought that was such a, an interesting and important insight, and again, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else talking about that.

Aoife O’Brien [00:12:00]:

Now moving on to the well, what can we do about this? And again, I want to reiterate, this is something that I’m learning as well. I’m, you know, I don’t have this right all the time I’m trying to put this stuff into practice, but it is, it’s hard, you know, but I think once we understand the why behind it makes it easier to actually to achieve the what. So number one is prioritisation, and I wanted to share something about the Eisenhower matrix. If you’re not familiar with the Eisenhower matrix, it’s the urgent and important and it’s on a matrix. So in the top I think it’s in the top, right, you’ll have the urgent and important. So these are the tasks that are both urgent and important and you need to do them.

Aoife O’Brien [00:12:46]:

And then in the bottom I think it’s actually the other way around. But anyway, in, in one of the bottom quadrants then is the not urgent, not important. And you’re like well why do I have to do this at all? And you don’t. So for me I really struggled with using that but I know a lot of people, it works really well for them. For me it didn’t really work. And then I did hear someone else saying if you’re neurodivergent, that kind of activity is actually quite difficult to do because we want to do everything or we perceive everything as being important and urgent and we want to do it straight away. So I totally resonated with that. But yeah, no, that did not work for me.

Aoife O’Brien [00:13:21]:

Works for some people. So I just wanted to highlight that in terms of prioritisation, maybe you’re not even thinking about prioritisation at the moment. I in my task list have started adding like high, medium and low priorities to things. I think that has worked quite well. But something new that I’m going to try is thinking about the three layers of prioritisation. So layer one is the strategic, long-term important work that is really necessary for you to grow your part of the business, to grow your career. It’s the important work that we often, you know, don’t put a deadline on that doesn’t have to be done straight away. So that’s layer one.

Aoife O’Brien [00:14:01]:

Layer two then is the core responsibilities. What is your day to day role? What are the things that you have to do, what are the deliverables that you have? And then number three is everything else. It’s the reactive support, it’s the meetings, it’s the firefighting, it’s the catch ups with your team. So thinking about prioritisation from those three different layers and again going back to this idea of well, when do you feel most energised at work and when can you do these kinds of things. For me personally I don’t have meetings on Mondays anymore. Very rarely do I have meetings on Monday and the same on Friday. I think I maybe started doing with no meetings on a Wednesday. I do mostly have meetings on Wednesdays these days but, but my Mondays and Fridays are usually protected Monday for the Strategic, deep thinking planning, Friday for the wrap up for anything that I haven’t finished during the week,

Aoife O’Brien [00:14:59]:

and this is all theoretical, by the way, because I sometimes I don’t get everything finished and sometimes Fridays have meetings or I’m on holidays or something. So it doesn’t always work out this way. But this is the idea behind how I do what I do. And I get that not everyone has that privilege, but even within your team, if you can come to some sort of arrangement where you are agreeing that you have half days or full days where you don’t have meetings within the team so that you can carve out the time that you need to do that deep and important work that you need to do. Coming back to this idea of calendar management, thinking about blocking out time. So how can you block out time for the focus work? And when I say block out time, I mean physically add that to your calendar. I again, I don’t always do this because I just recently made a mistake where I scheduled a masterclass that I was delivering at 7pm and it was right after a podcast recording that I had.

Aoife O’Brien [00:16:06]:

And I stupidly did not check my calendar before. I was like, oh, I always do it on Thursdays, I always do it at 7pm let’s just go with that. And it wasn’t until it was too late, it was all out there that I realised. Now, thankfully, the podcast recordings typically don’t go on for an hour. So I did have some time, some breathing space in between finishing a podcast recording, but I also should have realized that I needed an entire day blocked out before that because I needed to prepare. I needed to make sure that I wasn’t distracted by something else. So thinking about how to strategically block out your working week.

Aoife O’Brien [00:16:47]:

So if you have a presentation, for example, that you’re blocking out the entire day that people can’t book in meetings. So that’s from my perspective, but you want to block out the focus work, block out time for admin as well. So like I said, for me, admin is on Fridays, typically. Meetings with buffers if possible, even if it’s a five minute in between meetings. I know a lot of our meetings are online these days, so five minutes, if not 15 minutes, just to have that breather, to have that break, to get some fresh air, to grab a drink, whatever it might be, and then schedule time for breaks and recharging. I have recently started adding in a lunch hour to my week. So lunch hour Monday to Friday doesn’t always happen.

Aoife O’Brien [00:17:33]:

But it’s a reminder there that I’m like, okay, it’s a lunch hour now. I need to take some time away from the laptop and get outside, get some sunshine, whatever it might be. Number three then is the one in, one out. So this goes back to what I was saying about the, you know, if someone is making a request of you, then it’s a. It’s not about just taking on all of the requests and saying yes to everything. It’s about finding a way that works for you. And I love what Lisa has said,

Aoife O’Brien [00:18:04]:

it’s the yes in if. Lisa Bodell, who I mentioned. So yes if. Yes, if we can reprioritise, yes, if we can move this other thing to two weeks later. Yes, if the deadline can be X. You know, you get to decide what gets deprioritised. And again, you know, people are open to this. So have that conversation.

Aoife O’Brien [00:18:29]:

Number four is about building slack into your week. This is something that I learned a few years ago. I’m the kind of person who likes to have everything scheduled. What I do do is I have my calendar for meetings. I don’t put tasks and things into my calendar. And then I’ll have a calendar chock full of stuff. And what I’ve started doing is saying, how long is this going to take? And I know there are AI tools out there now that can say, okay, so you have a calendar, list of things, and here’s around how long that’s going to take.

Aoife O’Brien [00:19:09]:

And that could be four hours of tasks, let’s say, and then four hours of meetings in a day. That’s eight hours. That’s my entire day scheduled. So I need to take a couple of tasks out from the day to build in some slack because there are inevitably some things that come up or maybe something takes a bit longer, or maybe the meetings go on longer than expected. So building that slack into your week means that you don’t have to go over time in any one day. It means that you can reprioritise things, you can move things around slightly. So build slack into your week by don’t stack your calendar, plan for unexpected work, plan time for strategic thinking. Don’t forget to plan for rest as well.

Aoife O’Brien [00:19:53]:

And then there’s obviously going to be team conversations, whether they are impromptu conversations or scheduled one to ones as well. Number five then is all about delegating decisions. So are there things that your team come to you for and you’re like, they could actually decide that for themselves. So you’re having to do the thinking, and you feel busy because you have to do the thinking for someone else and not just have to do the thinking for yourself and your own workload. So what kind of decisions can you delegate? Can you take off your plate, can you give to someone else so that you don’t have the mental load of having to decide on behalf of someone else? And maybe there are things like, you know, within a specific budget that they can decide, you know, specific things or for a specific client or at a specific level, whatever that might be, whatever that looks like for you, but how can you take some of those decisions off your plate and give them to someone else or make some sort of automatic decisions? And what springs to my mind when I’m talking about those automatic decisions is how Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, they have this uniform for work, so, you know, they just wear the same thing day to day, and that’s that one decision taken away because it takes up so much of our space and our thinking when we have to decide these things. So however many decisions you can take away, so can you plan your meals in advance, even? And that takes a decision away from something that you have to think about in the moment.

Aoife O’Brien [00:21:30]:

And number six, then, is about reflection. This is something I talk about a lot and probably don’t do as much as I should, but that’s really thinking about, and whatever cadence works well for you. But at the end of a day or at the end of a week, what worked well? What could we do differently? Where did I feel most energised? Really personalizing the experience for you. And it means that we’re continuously improving how we do things, and you’re actively thinking about what is working well for you and what needs to be improved. And then number seven, and this is kind of a bonus-ey kind of thing, but it’s about thinking around the impact that you’re having. So when,

Aoife O’Brien [00:22:12]:

When I started this episode of the podcast, I was talking about the performative nature of busyness, and what if you could elevate your visibility based on the impact that you’re having? So focusing on that important work that you’re doing, not just the busyness, the putting out fires, but how to let people know the impact that you’re having in a way that feels really comfortable to you. Because I know a lot of us, we don’t want to feel like we’re bragging or, you know, we don’t want to feel like we’re bigging ourselves up. But actually letting people know the impact that you’re having will make their job easier to promote you to their leaders as well. So thinking about that impact that you’re having. But also don’t neglect to tell people everything that you have on your list just because something came in as urgent and it wasn’t necessarily on your task list. Like let people know these are the problems that you have been solving as well because that will all add to your visibility. Now I did mention at the start, would you like me to do a masterclass on this? Do let me know. I would be absolutely happy to do this.

Aoife O’Brien [00:23:19]:

Now, thinking about everything that I’ve been talking about here and this sense of busyness and think about it as you know, it’s not about time management, it’s a signal to us. What if it’s a signal about something that’s broken? That we don’t have clear boundaries, we don’t have systems in place, or we’re not clear on expectations that others have of us, or the expectations that we’re placing on ourselves are too high. And again, side note, expectations are one of the things that I spoke about in a recent masterclass that I did. If you’d like to get a replay of that, do let me know. Happy to share that on with you. I also spoke about this little trick let’s say that I have recently developed and that is the toddler approach. So if you get anything new coming in or even something that you’re doing on a regular basis, ask the questions. Why? Why are we doing this? Why are we doing it this way? You know, and start asking those hard questions about the work that you do on a day to day basis. This is the way we’ve always done it.

Aoife O’Brien [00:24:31]:

This just has to be done, no questions asked. You know, what are the reasons behind this work? And it also helps to understand the impact that you’re having. So I would love to know. I’ve shared so much today. What’s just one thing that you’re going to do differently? As a result of listening to today’s podcast, I am Most active on LinkedIn, so feel free to connect with me there. You can find all of my links on my website happieratwork.ie, and do feel free to reach out and let me know. What’s one thing that you’re going to do differently.