The busyness trap

Beware a Culture of Busyness

Once upon a time, leisure was a sign of prestige. Today that idea has been turned on its head, and busyness is the new status symbol. Busy people are considered important and impressive, and employees are rewarded for showing how “hard” they’re working. Such thinking is misguided. It can cause organ…

Harvard Business ReviewAdam Waytz

This article describes the reasons for our obsession with being busy. In part, those reasons are human nature:

• the harder we work to achieve something, the more we value it;
• most of us hate being lazy;
• we think that customers and colleagues like to see us busy;

The authors also present strategies to break this fixation:

• rewarding output, not activity;
• eliminating low-value work to make time for 'deep work';
• freeing people from the discipline of the clock and giving their minds time to be creative and wander;
• building slack into your systems and processes.