How Can We Solve “Busy”?

I often find myself coming home to my wife and having her ask, “How was your day?” My response many days, almost on repeat: “Busy.” And the same goes for her day: “Busy.” Talking to my clients, I’ll ask them how things are, and they will say, “Busy.” Busy, busy, busy! Therein lies the problem. Not the word itself, but the context behind the word. How can we solve “busy”?

Now when I hear “busy,” I’m more careful to evaluate the reason behind the saying. I’ll often find that I filled my day with menial tasks, inconsequential meetings, and other check-the-box type activities.

The true issue, I’ve come to realize, is that more important items move to the wayside in favor of these distractions. Because I chose to be “busy” rather than productive, the long-term good slips away. I fail my team, and worse, my organization. The bottom line is millions of people, including myself, do not use time wisely. This also means we don’t use our best abilities to their fullest capacities.

How Being Busy Impacts Your Business

My two biggest issues behind “busy”:

1. “Busy” holds back individual, team, and organizational results because time and talents are not filled with the highest and best use.
2. People actively max out their time, building stress and strains on the organization’s ability to perform at an optimal level.

We have much more control over our time than we give ourselves credit for. Each of us can design our days, weeks, and months to better suit our time and talents. We must become more aware of the misused time we put on our calendars. That includes the events and projects we say “yes” to when we probably shouldn’t. We need to honestly ask ourselves what the highest and best use of our time truly is.

Delegate and Elevate to Cure Busy

One tool to build awareness is Delegate and Elevate™. Simple and yet so effective, it opens our eyes to how we use our time.

To use it, first list the activities you engage in any given day or week and then place them into one of the four quadrants on the Delegate and Elevate sheet:

1. Love and Great (your sweet spot where you fully use your Unique Abilities)
2. Like and Good (you like doing these tasks well enough, but it doesn’t light you up)
3. Don’t Like and Good (you do these tasks well but don’t enjoy them)
4. Don’t Like and Not Good (tasks that suck time and joy out of your day with poor results)

Once you have the sheet completed, it will illuminate where your “busy” comes from. Most people live in the bottom two quadrants. They spend too much time doing activities they don’t like but do well. Or worse, they spend time doing things they don’t like and don’t do well. But now you know why you’re so busy.

From there, make commitments to delegate away the items that are not the highest on the list and the best use of your time. A few, of many, solutions available: hire someone, give the tasks to someone else, use technology to handle the work, outsource, stop, or process it away.

Productive Days

Once you can Delegate and Elevate your lower-quadrant tasks, “busy” turns to “productive.” As my clients take on growing volume and increased responsibility, I hope that becomes their answer. When asked, “How was your day?” they respond with words like productive, meaningful, and impactful.

Are you ready to have more productive, meaningful, and impactful days in your business?