Busywork: the most dangerous place to hide

Folks, today we are talking about busywork.

And not just the regular kind that is easy to spot; 

The endless meetings.

The garbage reports nobody reads. 

That ‘great idea’ that no one will ever use, but you now have to build.

Human beings will do just about ANYTHING, other than the thing that they actually DESPERATELY need to do.

In fact, I’d say that the more urgently you need to do something, the strong the urge will be to avoid it.

I think the most dangerous thing about busywork is that it feels productive, and it looks like you are actually making progress and moving towards your goals.

It is the epitome of bullshitting yourself.

It might sound like I’m having a go at white collar management, but this actually shows up everywhere - even in creative work.

Like everyone else, I’m not immune to it, and the reason I’m bringing it up today is that I recently spotted this in my project work.

How to spot busywork:

• It’s easy and you like doing it.

• You can autopilot while doing it.

• It’s easy to cross off your to do list, and looks like you’ve accomplished something of value.

• It’s tangentially related to your goal, so you can justify it to yourself, but it doesn’t actually contribute to the bottom line in any way.

• Even if you spent 1,000 hours on it, you would be no closer to actually achieving your goal (by its crudest definition).

• It may improve the overall quality of your thing, but if you only focus on this thing, you will never actually build/make/or achieve your thing at all.

How to find the thing you actually need to be doing:

• Usually, it’s the thing on your list you dislike the most, and if you do do it, you spend the least amount of time on it – the bare minimum basically – just enough to tell your psyche that you actually did it.

• If you spent 1,000 hours on doing this thing, you would absolutely achieve your goal (by its crudest definition). Most likely you will need less.

How to eradicate busywork:

1.     Write down the clearest, simplest, most no-frills, abridged, boiled down, essentials only, crux of, description of your goal.

This description, will be very simple and straight forward, and probably only involve 1-2 tasks that require a finite amount of hours to complete – not an infinite amount of tinkering.

2.     From now on, only work on tasks that directly contribute to your bare bones goal description. Nothing else.

Look at the tasks you are avoiding, and ask yourself why you don’t want to do them.

Be honest. Reflect on and dissolve these blocks.

Busywork is a form of avoidance, which is a mindset block. Clear the block and you’ll clear the busywork.