The Myth of Busy-phus
Do you feel like you’re constantly rolling a stone uphill in your business, only to do it again the next day?
Don’t feel bad, because a lot of that is due to workplace culture and beliefs that have taken over the American workplace. Even if you own your own financial or legal services business, you’re not immune to some of these ideas that have accumulated over time.
But that doesn’t mean that you have to choose to make your life as a business owner harder than it needs to be.
In my vast archive (click here), I’ve already talked about multitasking as a myth and debunked the idea that the brain is like a computer. Let’s look at some other concepts that aren’t really true, and how understanding those truths makes you more productive.
Myth: Taking breaks is being lazy
Conserving energy is one of the ways that species survive. Our ancestors weren’t hunting and gathering from sunup to sundown. They got some food and ate it, and then they hung out with each other. Maybe you think they were lazy, but the actions of our ancestors are why you exist.
The Puritans and some other religious people might have insisted that you’re supposed to work all the time or idle hands are the devil’s work, but the devil doesn’t exist. There’s no real reason why you should bust your butt for 45 or so years, then and only then (at retirement) have fun and enjoy yourself.
As I’ve said many times, the brain is not a computer. The operating system (if you like) has very different requirements compared to machines. Yet complex machines still need downtime for maintenance work. Brains need rest, and not just at night, for peak performance.
You’ve probably heard the Simon Sinek story about lumberjacks. (The tl;dr version: the one who sawed all day ended up cutting less wood, because the other one who kept taking breaks was sharpening their saw.) Your brain is your saw, and the way to sharpen it is actually to give it a rest periodically.
Myth: More hours worked = more results
If our brains operated like computers, then yes, you would expect if you put in 2X the hours you should get 2X results. And to a certain point, this is true of the brain. If you are only getting one hour of focus work in a day and you double that, then you probably will double your results.
But at a certain point, the executive function part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, is wiped out. If you add more hours onto the day, you won’t get more results because your “machine” is toast. Your brain only gets so much time in every 24 hours for deep work, about 4 to 4 ½ hours.
Once you’ve gone past that, you’re not going to get more results by adding more hours on. In fact, you might actually regress if you’re tired and you’re making mistakes and bad decisions.
Myth: It’s always faster to do it yourself
So many business owners tell me they don’t have enough time in the day to do everything. Or they are busy all day, but when it’s time to go home they realize they didn’t get any of their priorities accomplished.
Many times (not always) it’s because they spent all day doing piddly little tasks that were easy to do and get off the plate. However, these tasks could and should have been done by someone else (our outsourced or automated), leaving the business owner time to work on the things that only the business owner can do.
Sure, sometimes it’s faster to do certain things yourself. But only once. If it’s a task that comes up a lot, and can be delegated, then it’s faster to take the time to train someone on it in the long run.
Myth: Help should be delivered as soon as you see someone struggling
We love to help. In general, most humans feel good about helping others. So when someone asks for our help, we want to give it.
Sometimes, though, the person asking for help needs to stick with the task a little longer. They‘ve almost got it! Or maybe instead of taking over the task (which isn’t helping so much as it’s… taking over someone else’s work), you can ask some questions to help them think through it.
When we are surrounded by AI and automation, it’s more important than ever that people develop critical thinking and problem solving skills, because those are going to become ever more critical.
So if you jump in immediately, are you really helping that person? Being able to work on one’s own skills can also make people more confident.
Myth: Being busy is a sign of how important you are
You matter as a human being no matter how busy you are or are not. (It’s SO much easier to say this to other people than to tell myself this, by the way!)
Busyness doesn’t translate into success, either. You might see someone who’s busy, because her time management skills are poor and she’s always falling behind. Someone else might be busy because she keeps doing all the tasks in her business, even though she has staff to delegate to.
If you don’t trust your staff to get things done, that’s a “you” problem, honestly, not your staff’s. Either you didn’t hire the right people or you haven’t trained them well enough. Fortunately, both of these are fixable.
You can be very successful, yet not busy, if you have the right people, systems, and processes in place.
If you work only on the important tasks that move your business forward.
If you set aside time every single day for focused work where you are not interrupted.
When you know what the true priorities are, you can focus on them and leave time for the important things in life, like loved ones and fun activities.
Myth: Communications must be responded to right away
Our culture is one of immediacy, but that doesn’t mean everything is actually urgent. In fact, if you have the right people, systems, and boundaries in place, you probably don’t have a lot of urgent matters because you’ve prevented them from forming.
Most of the time, email senders want to know that they’re on your radar. That you got their email or text and it’s not sitting in limbo somewhere. A simple autoresponder will tell them you got the email (and that it didn’t go to spam). You can also explain what hours you batch emails, if you do that at specific times. For most people, that’s enough.
Batching emails also gives you time to respond. If you’re in the legal or financial fields, your clients often have questions that you might not know off the top of your head anyway.
Instead of:
Interrupting your concentration to read their email
Then responding to let them know you have to research it and get back to them
Then getting back to them
You could simply have the autoresponder automatically let them know you got it so that
Your one and only response is the answer to their question.
Recap (tl;dr)
Many workplace myths get in the way of being productive with your time. The more you can accomplish at work, the more time you can free up for other things like fun with your loved ones.
If you want some help revamping your business so that you can grow and thrive yet still have time for the life part of the work-life balance, click here to schedule your free consultation.
Image of Sisyphus from Museo del Prado.