This post was written in the Time Before COVID, so there are quaint notions about staying home if you have a cold... Everything else is still entirely relevant. Even in, especially in, working from home.
Simon Garfield’s book Timekeepers explores ideas about time and the history of timekeeping – it is the sort of amiable and eclectic read where your brain can contentedly hum along a country lane with a regular supply of scenic vistas and interesting surprises. But there was one passage in the book that unexpectedly jolted my scenic drive onto a pitted dirt track and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. The jolt was a bit tangential to the ‘history of time management’ narrative of that particular chapter so the author didn’t dwell on it, but it left me wanting to know more because it encapsulates a serious problem with business culture.
In that particular section, Garfield talks with Laura Vanderkam, the author of many self-help time management books. For her research she conducted detailed surveys on how people used their time and found people overestimated the hours they worked. And she wasn’t the only one to see this. There is ample sociological research to show that the higher the number of estimated hours the more it was likely to be exaggerated – up to 25 hours for people claiming to be working 75+ hours a week. People lying is hardly news, but I found Vanderkam’s assessment chilling:
‘When I get in a sombre mood it makes me angry, because I think there’s something insidious going on’, Vanderkam says. ‘By exaggerating workweeks, people can make some jobs appear off-limits to those that care about having a life. Making women – and men – think they must inevitably choose between a particular career and their families will knock a huge chunk of the competition out.’
Simon Garfield, Timeskeepers, p.296
There are so many thoughts intersecting in that statement around culture, gender equity and (self-)deception.
The chilling aspect is how this exaggeration is accepted as being normal – that the only way to do some jobs, especially senior positions, is by being super busy and working long hours. (And therefore, by extension, that the best way to demonstrate capability for those jobs is by emulating that behaviour in your current job – or at least exaggerating our behaviour apparently).
This exaggerated behaviour is part of the Cult of Busyness. ‘Busyness’ being the state of always being flat out busy at work (and often also in private life…). Do a Google search on ‘busyness’ and you’ll get many hits, but the sociological guts of it is we have come to perceive ‘busyness’ with social status – basically, being busy surely means you must be in demand and thus Important. Signalling busyness is therefore a way of signalling higher social status (and conversely not being busy is read as a sign of lower social status – at least in the Anglosphere, similar research in Italy indicated that they assumed someone not working was rich…).
This is not just fluffy sociology about social mobility scales and Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, it has a real impact on people and their lives. Often the sacrifice at the altar of busyness is sleep and sleep deprivation can be a key indicator of chronic health conditions. The other sacrifice is human connections with family, friends and colleagues.
A few years ago I had a great conversation with a friend I shall call Mike who has a high-profile executive officer-type job for a prominent State-wide organisation. As you can imagine he had a very busy and often reactive schedule. In all the work busyness, he was aware of having a work/life balance so made sure there were the allotted family times in the evening or weekends after which he would go back to the office or push on past midnight editing a document or two at home. But what he found was that, yes, the ‘Family Time’ box was ticked, it wasn’t really working out because simply wrapping work around everything else meant that he was always switched on for work, always a bit tired and grumpy and even in the carefully allotted family times he wasn’t really ‘there’ and fully engaged in what they were doing. In his words the long work hours “were stealing from his family” – he was sacrificing his human connections for the work. This isn’t a sea-change story where the stressed family moved to a small town, eventually bonding with the eccentric locals whilst running a coffee van and it’ll all be in a new hilarious yet heart-warming series on the ABC 1. He didn’t change jobs, but he changed his job. He focused on prioritisation and delegation and made sure getting a decent night’s sleep was the top priority. Stuff still happened, and he could still find himself on a plane to go sort out an issue in a far-flung company office at any moment, but he felt he and his family were far more resilient and able to find creative solutions to those hiccups. Long story short: busyness is a choice.
Then there are other aspects of the Cult of Busyness. Chyonne Kreltszheim points out there is a strong theme of avoidance in busyness. A constant busy-busy-busy lifestyle can become a shield to avoid tackling some matters, maybe it’s something deep and existential like underlying mental health matters, or maybe it’s simply to deflect the tasks we don’t like to do. Perhaps it’s status signalling by being the one that’s too busy on other important matters to complete the mere weekly report on time, or perhaps it’s putting off that possibly unpleasant performance discussion with a team member because, well, that really important weekly report is due on Wednesday isn’t it, so I better focus on that.
Returning to Vanderkam’s statement that triggered all of this, the cult of busyness has an impact on gender equity. We already know that women tend to start promotional opportunities at a disadvantage because they are more likely to wait until they are ‘100% confident’ that they have the required skills and experience before applying whereas men are more socialised to ‘give it a go’ even if their internal confidence level may be much lower. So if the job opportunity is made to look like it is tough going then women may be less likely to apply. And then layer upon that women still carry the greater burden of effort outside of the workplace in household chores and child care so are likely to be even more conscious of time demands in a new opportunity, you have a business culture almost deliberately designed to exclude women (and a lot of men who want a life beyond work). Clever way to knock out the competition guys. Great outcome for a few individuals (maybe?), but a lousy outcome for the organisation in restricting diverse approaches to the work. So the next time you are hesitating about putting your hand up for that tough-looking job remember that the toughness is likely to be somewhat exaggerated and there are more ways to do a job than just being super-busy.
If you’ll indulge me a momentary excursion down a favourite road on Innovation Drive, the cult of busyness is also hugely self-defeating because it robs us of time to be creative – to think about and do things that would actually improve our work, make things less busy and help us with our long-term goals. Innovation isn’t just big new shiny products, it’s also the everyday tweaks to process that can make a world of difference. It can simply be having a bit of thinking space to properly prioritise your day and make your case to drop or delegate some tasks. It can be having a bit of time to check in with the clients to see if the quarterly 200-page report that your team has produced since, well, forever, is really what they still need for their business goals. Being on the innovation bandwagon2 you often hear the feedback from the side of the road like:
- “I know what I want to do – I don’t have time to write it down as a plan.”
- “Yes, there are better ways of doing this, but it is due next month and we don’t have any time to make changes to the process now.”
- And my personal favourite… “Yes, a lessons learnt session on that project would be great so we don’t repeat the mistakes we made, but the next project has just started so we don’t have time.”
Notice a pattern?
Kreltszheim makes a powerful point that the first step to leaving the cult is about language – being mindful of what is said and your feelings. Her suggestion is to play ‘Busyness Bingo’. Listen to yourself and others about how often you talk about being ‘busy’. As a starter pack I’ll offer some suggestions, but once you tune in you’ll find many more:
- It’s just crazy this week! (But apparently, I still have plenty of time to tell you in great detail you how busy I am…)
- I can’t get to that report/review/inquiry/discussion you want today, it’s just too busy.
- I’ll just grab something to eat at my desk.
- Cough. I really shouldn’t have come in today. Cough, wheeze.
- Status update: At work again on Sunday afternoon! Sad emoji.
Language is the foundation of culture, so the more you hear these sort of phrases the more likely you’re looking at a work culture warped by busyness. And if you don’t like the culture, firstly don’t do it yourself. Pull up on spending time explaining why you are so busy – spend the time reviewing and prioritising. Take your lunch away from the desk to eat (eating at your desk is a health hazard anyway), go take a break and talk to someone (but not about how busy you are). If you are sick, stay home, work from home if you must, but respect your colleagues and skip the martyr-to-my-important-job social signalling (and not being particularly productive anyway and spreading disease to your colleagues). Flexible working is great, but avoid signalling that working all the time is normal and expected. Yes, stuff happens and you may need to put some time on a Sunday afternoon, but do you need the social media updates announcing it? No one posts that they’re going to work on a Tuesday morning do they? A closely-related signal is the out-of-hours email and the creeping pressure that can bring. Unless there is an actual time-dependency either avoid the after-hours message or consider using the ‘delay delivery’ option on email sent after hours to arrive later at a more appropriate time (bonus tip: if you time it right, that message will be at the top of the list when the receiver starts up their computer in the morning).
And as final kicker about the importance of language in confronting the cult, I’ll leave the final word to Laura Vanderkam:
Instead of saying “I don’t have time” try saying “it’s not a priority,” and see how that feels. Often, that’s a perfectly adequate explanation. I have time to iron my sheets, I just don’t want to. But other things are harder. Try it: “I’m not going to edit your résumé, sweetie, because it’s not a priority.” “I don’t go to the doctor because my health is not a priority.” If these phrases don’t sit well, that’s the point. Changing our language reminds us that time is a choice. If we don’t like how we’re spending an hour, we can choose differently.
Laura Vanderkam
