Busy Work vs. Productive Work
In this post, I’m going to talk about busy work and productive work. I find myself sometimes engaging in busy work for the sake of busy-ness but later on conclude it’s not contributing to my productiveness. At the end of the day, when I’m auditing my day or thinking about where all my time went, I come to the realization that I should’ve done work sooner, why I was procrastinating up until this point and where I could’ve performed better.
This is a post to audit, keep myself accountable and have a reference for evaluating for myself what I am engaging in.
Exploring this distinction between productive time and busy time has reminded me how to distinguish the two and hopefully it can help you too!
So first off.
You can be busy and productive. Those are not two mutually exclusive ideas. However, there is an important separation. You can be busy without being productive. You can also be productive and not feel busy.
There are people who can somehow meet all the deadlines, do all the necessary things and excel without feel overwhelmed. Meanwhile, there can be people who are constantly busy, overworked, over-stressed, and just cannot seem to feel accomplished, met goals or moving forward.
The follow-up to that is that some people cannot independently identify whether something is important. Or don’t know how to advocate for what is important versus what is not.
Here’s a cheat sheet on how I think about it and I’ll go into each category separately later on.
| Busy | Productive | |
|---|---|---|
| Energy is... | Frantic | Focused |
| Fueled By... | Perfectionism | Purpose |
| Founded In... | Working Harder | Working Smarter |
| Achieved by... | Being Good At Everything | Being Great At Few Important Things |
| Necessity... | Depends | Yes |
ENERGY IS…
Where is your energy coming from? If you feel scatterbrained, flustered, all-over-the-place, racing along, chances are you are feeling busy. If your mind is racing a mile a minute, there’s so much to do, and it feels like you’ve got your hand in everything, you are busy.
People who are productive are focused. They can also be involved in many things but there is a single focused reason for it. They can label what they are gaining, achieving, and aiming for with each project. They know what they contribute to that project and why they are needed or involved.
FUELED BY…
Busy people are fueled by a need for perfectionism - a need to get things just right. If you nit-pick about every detail, you can certainly generate a list of all the things that need fixing before it is ready. Whether it’s a project, a song, a program, a presentation, a performance, or a product. It needs to be perfect before it is ready to be scrutinized, available for public consumption and public criticism.
If things aren’t perfect, it isn’t released.
Flash forward 1 month later and it still isn’t ready.
Productive people are aware it isn’t perfect. But that’s not the point. The point is that it’s available. For example, an imperfect product is released as version 1 on the market. Sure there are problems with its design, there’s issues worth investigating further, but it’s still a product that is available to be purchased.
If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late. - Reid Hoffman
FOUNDED IN…
Working hard versus working smart. I don’t think think these are mutually exclusive. People can work smart and hard. People can work not smart and not hard as well. But I think it neatly captures the main feeling behind busy, frantic work and focused, prioritized work.
Hard work is the muscle, gusto, power through and persevere mentality. If you can’t figure it out, throw yourself at it and spend more time to figure it out.
And sure, that is a way to get things done. But is it the most productive way.
Working smarter is the notion of optimizing your workload to what is needed as well as what can be accomplished efficiently. Sure, at first there’s a much larger cognitive load and it can be much more mentally-taxing at first, but a lot of the solutions that come from working smarter make the process easier.
When I think of working smarter, I always consider scripts for data mining. A non-techy person would be doing it manually, pulling information from single database to single database and compiling the data manually. It’s hard work. But maybe put in a couple more hours and you can brute force complete the job.
A working smarter option would be to write a script to automatically complete the task. Sure, the initial buy-in and required cognitive load to write the script initially is much greater but the payoff means the laborious, tedious work can be offloaded.
“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” -Bill Gates
ACHIEVED BY…
When thinking about someone who is working hard, knowing that they are approaching things in a perfectionistic way, bottled in a frantic energy, there is a sense of needing to do everything right - that everything must be looked at and every nook and cranny must be reviewed.
This by nature leads one to aspire to be good at everything. Every aspect of the project. Every aspect of the job must be some arbitrary level of correct. By trying to get everything just right, that makes you extremely busy because you have to spend time on everything. And by spending time on everything, you lose focus on what exactly is the goal.
By being productive, you can understand your specific focus and recognize you are not necessarily equipped to address the issues outside this specific scope. You are great at one thing. And everything else falls to the side. It can be done by someone else. It can be done better by someone else, who is great at that one specific thing instead. So again, focused, specific work not frantic or scattered.
NECESSITY…
When I consider the necessity level, I think about the Eisenhower Matrix.
If you don’t know what the Eisenhower Matrix is, the quick and dirty is…you have 4 quadrants:
Urgent and Important
Non-urgent and Important
Urgent and Not-Important
Non-urgent and Non-Important
Productive work should live in the quadrants 1 and 2 - Urgent and Important or Non-urgent and Important.
That isn’t to say you should absolutely not do anything in quadrant 3 or 4 because mental health, recharging, resting and avoiding burn out activities can definitely fall into non-urgent and non-important activities - you know….to have a happy life…but your work should be focused and important with ranging degrees of urgency
If you are spending too much time in the urgent and not-important category, you may be invested in busy work but it may not be relevant to what you deem important and it may not be focused
So the next time you are evaluating your day, making your list of things to do, deciding what to spend your 24 hours a day doing, ask yourself the following questions.
Is this item important work?
Is this item clearly defined and focused?
Can this item be offloaded to someone better suited for this type of work?
Is there a smarter way to do this?
Is this task necessary?
I think there are always going to be times where it lands 50/50 or you answer one way at a certain time and then later feel that your answer has changed. I think the main take away is to start asking these questions more regularly. Being consciously participating in deciding and designing your day, your to-do list, your work schedule is the important part. Because if you are passive about it, you can find yourself busy but not necessarily productive.
Loosely based on the concept by Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist, which suggests 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. Working smarter to identifying that 20% of vital work maximizes the upside.