The Real Reason Were All So Busy and What to Do About It
Transcriber: Jiwon Lee
Reviewer: David DeRuwe
We live in a time-pressed culture.
There is never enough time,
and we see it, we feel it
around us every day.
We live in a world that valorizes work,
accomplishment, busyness,
and there’s real upside to that -
there’s real value.
We’re pushed, we’re driven toward
achievement and action and creation,
and that’s great,
but there’s also a downside,
and that’s something that I think
is worth talking about.
There was a study done a while back
by the Management Research Group
of 10,000 senior leaders,
and they asked them what is key
to your organization’s success?
And 97% said “long-term,
strategic thinking.”
I mean, when was the last time
that 97% of people agreed on anything?
There is near unanimity
that being a long-term thinker,
having perspective,
having the ability to think and ask
big questions is essential to our success.
And yet, in a separate study,
96% of leaders were surveyed,
and they said they don’t have time
for strategic thinking.
(Laughter)
What is going on? Why is it?
How can it be that 96% of people
are not doing the one thing that they say
is most critical to their success?
Well, I think we know the answer,
or at least we think we do.
The average professional
attends 62 meetings per month.
That sounds pretty outrageous.
How could that be?
But if you actually break it down,
it’s not that many.
It’s two to three meetings per day,
which is probably average for many of you.
So 62 meetings a month,
that does not help, and that is not wrong.
It is a contributor.
Also, we know, we know what else - email.
A study a while back by McKinsey
showed that the average professional
spends 28% of their time
just responding to email.
Of course, that drains us;
of course, that makes us busy.
But the truth is, it’s also,
I believe, not the full picture.
Those are manifestations.
Those are problems, legitimately.
But there are also some other things
going on underneath the surface,
reasons that, perhaps,
we are in some ways,
working at cross-purposes
because for so long,
almost all of us have said
we want desperately to be less busy,
and yet we keep making choices
that put ourselves
in a position where we’re
just as busy as we’ve always been.
What is going on?
Well, some research
out of Columbia University
sheds a little bit of light on this.
Sylvia Bellezza and her colleagues
have done interesting research
into the fact that in some cultures,
American culture chief among them,
busyness is actually a form of status.
When we say, “Oh, I am so crazy busy,”
what we’re really saying
is a societally accepted version
of “I am so important.
I am so popular. I am so in demand.”
And the truth is that feeling
can be hard to give up,
even if we say that we want to.
That’s not the only reason, of course.
It turns out it is very hard
for the human mind to deal
with conditions of uncertainty,
and in modern life, there’s a lot of it.
Sometimes we are given
tasks or challenges,
and the truth is, tactically,
we just don’t know how to do it.
Increase sales by 30%.
Well how? There’s a lot of ways
you could do it; you’re not sure how.
Sometimes it’s easier, frankly,
to just double down and keep doing
more of what you’re already doing.
That might not be the best answer,
but it’s an answer,
and it removes uncertainty.
The picture gets even worse when
we’re talking about existential questions,
when we’re talking
about uncomfortable matters
that we might not actually
really want to deal with.
That might be, “Am I in the right job?”
It might be, “Am I in the right career?”
Those are often questions, truth be told,
we might not want the answer to,
and so we become busy as a way
so that we don’t even
have to ask the question.
Now, there’s a third reason,
and I’ll admit it’s one
that I know well personally,
and that is that sometimes we use busyness
as a way to numb ourselves out.
I’ve experienced that.
This is my boy, Gideon,
and he died in 2013.
I’d had him for 17 years,
and he was my best friend.
And after he died, I’ll be honest,
I didn’t want to be home
because I knew that he wouldn’t be there.
And so for two years,
my life, basically,
was an Uber to an airport,
to a hotel, and back again
because I just really
didn’t want to face that.
For a lot of us, there are things
we sometimes don’t want to face.
What we’re really looking for
with work is an anesthetic,
And as I like to say,
“Work is better than crack.”
So if you’re choosing,
(Laughter)
it’s not the worst.
(Laughter)
But the truth is, it’s also
not a sustainable solution.
For many of us, we get trapped
in the pattern of busyness, of overwork.
It’s hard sometimes even to remember
what it was like before.
Oftentimes in our mind’s eye,
when we think of busyness,
what we think of is this:
What we think of is triumphant success
and the world at your fingertips.
The truth is, more often,
busyness looks like this:
(Laughter)
It looks like loneliness.
It looks like frustration.
It looks like having a life
that’s not really in your full control.
So I would like to propose
that we make a change.
because if we are ever going to succeed
in beating back busyness once and for all,
first of all, we have to get real
and acknowledge what is actually behind
some the busyness
that is filling our days.
We have to really get honest
about what it is that’s motivating us
so that we can make a different choice -
because it is about our choice.
We need to recognize that real freedom
is about creating the space
so that we can breathe,
the space so that we can think.
Ultimately, real freedom
is about choosing how and with whom
we want to be spending our time.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)