Do Not Hide Behind "Busy Work"

How Do You Spend Your Time?

How are you doing?  Fine, how about you?  Oh, I've been real busy.  It has been so busy at work the time is flying by too quickly.  Oh man, have I been busy, too.  It has been so busy at work!  We've been really busy at work.  I have been so busy, lately, wow.  Man, it has been busy at work for me, too!  I'm too busy.  Can you help me with something?  No, I'm too busy.  Busy, busy, busy.  All we seem to be is busy.  There is so much work to do that all I seem to be able to do is keep busy.  I am too busy to add anything else to my schedule.  Man have I been busy, lately!

Being busy does not necessarily mean you are being productive.

Being busy does not necessarily mean you are profitable.

Being productive and profitable are completely different than being busy.  If you are sleeping, you are busy getting some rest.  Sleeping does not mean you are being productive and profitable.

When you go to work at your business, make sure you spend more time being productive as opposed to being busy.  If you count the progress of money every day, make sure you are not doing it once per hour.  The only time you should do that activity every hour is if you are moving large sums of money around to gain profits on changing interest rates that move greater than the cost of your transfer fees.  Do not waste your time watching the water while it tries to boil.  Be productive, not busy.

Did you know that an owner of a business speaks differently when they have made a great profit today compared to an owner who did a lot of busy work?  It is true.  When you ask each one how their day was today you will get two completely different answers from these owners.  It is true.  One will tell you how busy they were at work today.  The other will carefully describe how something good happened to them today.  Which one are you usually describing each day?  Stop and think about it.  Are you too busy to become more productive?  Amazing enough, most business owners are.

Being busy can sabotage your efforts from being more productive and more profitable.  It can hijack your time and prevent you from becoming more successful.  It can monopolize your time chips leaving you with very little time to become more profitable.  A lot of business owners are plagued by this scenario.  Be very careful with how you spend you time.  Be very careful how you do what you decide to do.  You are in charge of the duties you need to be doing.  Choose your duties well.  Choose the duties that are more productive and profitable as opposed to the ones that keep you busy.  Busy does not always mean profitable.  Know the difference in your business model.

I had a good friend who would take his watch off when you came to him to ask him some questions.  He was one of my best business leaders from the past.  He has since passed away.  He had a seasoned secretary that guarded his time chips.  When you wanted to see him about something, she would check to see if he had time to spend with you right now.  He would either set a time soon to see you or spend it right now.  When you walked into his office he would take off his wrist watch and set it down on his desk as he told you how long you had.  His watch had a little timer on it.  If you needed more time, he might add it to the timer.  Once the time was established for the meeting, he pressed the timer button to start.  He was not a stiff personality, just efficient with his time.  He learned the art of filling his time chips with more of the productive stuff we sometimes forget to manage.  He forced himself to make sure productive stuff was getting done.  He had a great personality.  He was a good conversationalist.  He listened very well.  He had great ideas and suggestions.  Yet when his timer went off, you were done.  He would thank you for the time and say, "Regina will lead you out."  You were done.  He needed to get back to his productivity.

His small business had a revenue stream of $18 million per year.  His income portion may have been somewhere near six percent of that total.  He did not want to talk about what kind of fertilizer you used on your backyard.  He saved that kind of conversation for a barbecue after work if you were lucky enough to be invited.  There is a time and place for everything.  Make sure you learn how to manage that use of time well.  Being busy can cover up the time you need to be using for being more productive.  Be careful.

Maybe It Is Not All About 24/7!

There have been times in my business career that I have managed my time so poorly I wonder how anything good was able to occur.  I wasted time like it meant nothing.  It was like going fishing with out a pole.  I would return without fish and blame the weather.  We all have been there.  Useful time chips are hard to maintain.  The world is full of distractions.  Furthermore, we get distracted very easily.  We get lost sometimes and lose our focus.  It is very easy to do.

The best use of time I have ever seen was the time management system set by that wrist watch manager.  I once asked him how he managed his time chips.  He reached into one of his desk drawers and pulled out a pocket sized spiral notebook.  He tossed it across his desk to me.  He said, "Open it up to the first page."  I did.  It was blank.  Then he said, "Write at the top of the page, Monday."  I did.

He told me to use the left hand column on each page as a place to record the time.  Beginning on Monday, he wanted me to record the time when I changed a duty or activity.  For example,  as he looked at his watch, it is "three-thirty right now."  Place three thirty in the left hand column.  Next to each time record, jot down the activity you are doing in a brief form.  "Next to three thirty, jot down Jim's office."  He described how you do not need to be too descriptive with describing the activities you do.  You will magically remember them.  When you change activities, jot down the time and the description of the change you made with your activity.  He said, "When we are done here and you go back to your office, write down the time and jot down...back to office."  "That is it," he said.  You can record the time chips you devote to the kinds of activities you spend doing in each one of your days at work.  This will tell you how you spend your time.  It will not lie.

He said he wanted me to do this exercise for two solid weeks.  He wanted me to record the time I used on every change in activity I spent.  I at first thought it sounded silly.  I knew for sure how it looked like it would be a total waste of my time.  It was not.  It did not take but just a moment each time I made an activity change.  After a bit, I got the hang of recording my activity changes very quickly.  Most of the time I could make the recording in the notebook during my walk from one activity to another.  It became very easy to do.  It was amazing how much time I had to do the recording I did.  It was always a brief note recorded and amazing enough, I did remember every activity I did by the brief notes I took.  It was not very hard to do this exercise.

I returned to his office two weeks later like he suggested.  We chatted about it for a little while and he took my notebook of recordings.  He said he would get back to me on it.  I left feeling kind of strange about how he put me through this effort and left it alone.  The next day he called me to his office.  He told me he reviewed my recordings.  In his opinion, I spent about one to one-in-a-half hours each day being productive.  The rest of my time was spent performing 'busy work.'  He said he wanted me to learn how to increase the use of my productive time by at least five times more than what I was doing.  He said I was not wasting time, just choosing the least productive tasks to fill with my time.  He said I was efficient with my time chips, however, the things I was choosing to do with my activity time chips were not the best choices I could choose.  He suggested that I learn how to choose my activities better.  He handed the notebook back to me with his notations in it.  The only notes he made were on the circled activities he considered productive.  That was it.

As I left his office, he said he had one very strong recommendation for me.  Do not hide behind 'busy work.'

I have performed that exercise several times in my continuing career.  Each time I discover the many things I am doing that are not productive.  It is amazing how we gravitate to perform the kinds of activities that help us to hide from the kinds of things we should be doing.  This is especially true if the kinds of things we need to do are uncomfortable to do.  We get busy spending our time doing something else.  We creatively fill our time chips doing things that help us to avoid doing what we do not like to do.  We must learn how to do the things we do not like to do if we are to become more successful in our business models.  We must begin each day with a productive heart, a productive style and a productive approach.  That usually means we need to quit doing the busy work that we sometimes allow to dominate our daily activity management.

In the four years I worked with that particular leader, I never once saw him work overtime, nor take any work home to 'catch up on things.'  Never once.  He believed he gave a full day to his business.  That is all it took to become successful.  What did not get done in that day would need to wait until tomorrow.  That was it.  He was one of the most successful business leaders I have ever met.  He did not work to stay busy.  He worked to be productive.

Until next time...