Glorification of Busy
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Life is busy. The idea of work/life balance seems to be the impossible goal. We all approach our ideas of work/life balance differently. It turns out we spend a lot of our time telling each other how busy we are, but what if we flipped the conversation to be less about "busy" and more about developing capacity to do more and to do it better? Come find out how you can help build this capacity in yourself and others. (Slides from presentation at ACUHO-I 2015)
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Glorification of Busy
- 3. Avg person = 25 years asleep
- 4. Avg person = 9.1 years
- 5. Avg person = 90% of time indoors
- 6. Avg person = 3.6 years
- 7. Avg person = 4.3 years
- 8. Avg person = 70% of waking time
- 11. We have a WAIT problem!
- 12. “Busy is a decision. You don't find the time to to do things... You MAKE the time to do do things.” -Debbie Millman
- 20. Tips for Better Task-Switching • Acknowledge it • The 80/20 rule • “Batch processing” • Concentrated Time
- 22. Working Hard vs Capacity
- 23. Working Hard vs Capacity
- 24. Working Hard vs Capacity We think about being BUSY from a binary or a zero sum…
- 25. Working Hard vs Capacity We think about being BUSY from a binary or a zero sum… It’s a blending of OPPORTUNITIES and TALENTS and RESOURCES.
- 26. Working Hard vs Capacity Opportunities ResourcesTalent
- 27. Working Hard vs Capacity Opportunities ResourcesTalent CAPACIT Y
- 28. Developing Capacity • Balance vs blend • Organizational skills • Delegation • Ownership/agency • Reflection • Resilience
- 29. Developing Capacity • Stop the charade… • Be honest (with yourself & others) • PRIORITIZE!
- 30. How to Prioritize Relationships are the currency of our trade
- 31. How to Prioritize Relationships are the currency of our trade Do the crappy stuff first
- 35. Buddy Up! 1. How can you start to develop skills in the next month? 2. How will this positively affect your perceived “busyness”?
- 36. Big Group Discussion • Did anything surprise you about how you view your skills? • What could improve your perception of “Busyness”?
- 37. Ideas to take with you…. • “The List” activity with job functions • Counter-act The Wait Problem • Assess quality over quantity • “Perfectly balanced. You?”
- 38. @pottscharlie #UMRACUHO All photos from search.creativecommons.org Share something you learned today! #ACUHOI
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Intro Introvert Please sign up so I know who was here (optional, of course) – happy to send out links (a Google doc w/resources I used), continue the dialogue, etc. Name, Twitter handle, email. Would love to have you Tweet your thoughts today. Not here to give answers about what you do to manage how you talk about being busy. Hopefully raise a few questions, give you time and a tool to reflect a bit. Maybe even get you fired up. Nothing gets res life folks more fired up than talking about the work/life blend or how we use our time. Interrupt as we go!
- This is how many of us see our lives. Today I want to have us talk about the state of being BUSY and what that means. How we think of BUSY in terms of time. How we use our time – and how we honestly address how we use our time. Developing capacity to be okay with doing more because we do it better. A little activity & brief discussion. Boom – we have an hour of awesomeness done. I want us to think today – during this hour – about how we use our time and what we really mean when we say we’re BUSY. So I got on this thing about TIME since it’s how we most often measure busy and I wanted to dig for some facts. I heard on the radio a stat about the fact that Brits spend up to a year of their life hungover. Not the healthiest way to frame a discussion at a res life conference, so I looked to other things…
- Got this from a cool infographic-filled page on distractify.com. Pretty sure that’s like Buzzfeed but whatever.
- Watch TV for 9.1 years (avg 2.8 hrs/day) Surprising? This is likely changing a bit with how we define “TV” (students now watch ridiculous amounts of Netflix but don’t consider it TV)…
- You spend 90% of your time indoors 1.1 years cleaning Not sure what percentage of that 90% is spent lurking in windows, but it was the best graphic I could create.
- 3.6 years eating (or about 67 minutes per day) Do you think you spend that much time? Do our students?
- 70% of our waking life in front of digital media. Pew Internet Research study shows that most in the young professional demo spend at least 1-2 hours a day checking social media – not all at once, but in between meetings, walking to the car, at boring presentations… Advertisements, TV, computers, social media, etc. ALL THE TIME. We’ll talk about multi-tasking soon, but this is one of the key elements in multi-tasking that is shaping how we approach “BUSY” now.
- Avg American works 10.3 years (40 hrs/wk from age 20-65) Avg employee spends 5 years sitting at a desk Avg employee spends 2 years sitting in work meetings Part of today is also talking about how honest we are about the time we are BUSY and how that affects the way we talk about it. Study by Roland Paulsen in Organization (a journal) says that time spent on private activities at work is between 1.5 and 3 hours a day. 60% of all online purchases were made between 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m.
- Being BUSY is ostensibly about TIME. Darwin my advisor said “You can’t make progress unless you make TIME.” I’d argue that – it’s not about just having TIME, it’s what you DO with that time. Busy is always about TIME. I don’t have time. We don’t have time. We ran out of time. Etc. The first thing people say when I ask them how things are going. “Good. Busy.” That’s such a bad answer. I get it – we get it – we’re all BUSY. I read a good article recently about the instant nature of sports fans now but it really translates to this conversation. It was a discussion of America’s WAIT PROBLEM.
- I read a good article recently about the instant nature of sports fans now but it really translates to this conversation. It was a discussion of America’s WAIT PROBLEM. We live in a time of instant everything – instant reaction, instant highlights, instant gratification… WAITING seems to be our biggest issue and this leads to the problem of BUSY. And it leads to us actually being busy but – more importantly – it leads us to THINKING that we’re too busy.
- I love this. In an interview for the Good Life Project, Debbie Millman (author & radio host) said this about being BUSY in the context of designing your life. You decide what you want to do and how important those things are to you. Our actions, not our words, determine our actual priorities. And how often are we “TOO BUSY” to do things that actually make us better? I’m too busy to read for fun. I’m too busy to work out. I’m too busy to do this, that, etc.
- But here’s the crux of the issue for me and I hope where you might have some push-back. We can talk all we want about handling our tasks better and balancing our lives to not always be so busy, but we often use it to justify our work. How many of you answer “How are you?” with “Good. Busy.” I do it ALL THE TIME and I need to stop. “Busy” is a non-answer. When you try to tell someone how busy you are, you alienate them… Tell another colleague? Sure, but how much sympathy do you really have? If someone says that to me, I’ve never once responded with “Wow, you’re right. You are the busiest person here. My life is so easy compared to yours.” Tell a student? What’s the message you send by telling a student you’re too busy? BUSY is often a misnomer. Our students are way too busy to do things we ask of them, but they somehow watch full seasons on Netflix over the weekend. We often say we’re too busy but yet when a cool opportunity comes up we suddenly have time. Rarely do we turn down things that will help our career… or if it’s something that would result in someone perceiving us more positively, we rarely cough out the “Oh, I’m just too busy right now.” But we feed into this with our traditional ways of tracking or talking about our job. Programming reports, end of the year reports, justifying our work load to our supervisors, etc. What I’ve often found is that my supervisor is infinitely busier than I am AND they know exactly what I am actually doing – so busy doesn’t work. Tim Krieder wrote an opinion piece in the NY Times in 2012 and says “Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possible be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.” I think we often think this of our work. We don’t often know how to handle down time to we create more for ourselves to do in order to justify TO OTHERS the value of our work. And that’s too bad – our work is valuable – we don’t need to do that. Give me thoughts on this… Another piece to professional self-preservation that leads to being “TOO BUSY” is this….
- We have an “I’m so busy” problem! We do this, right? It’s a default answer even when we know we shouldn’t say yes, we do. And we lead up to it by telling everyone how busy we are. So this is related to professional self-preservation, too…. It’s a way for us to back out of having to say NO and take on something that we maybe should. Example: A colleague in another office asks me to serve on a committee. I know that I’m likely going to say yes, because I always do, but I lead with “I’m so busy right now…” and often that person will assume I don’t want to do it or can’t handle it and might not ask. So it’s our way to use “BUSY” as a shield. Maybe it’s helpful – even if very passive – for us to say no this way. But maybe it’s a misguided way of passing up something that could be beneficial but we’re scared of. Stay with me here. We’re not saying NO, per se. But we’re using BUSY as a shield so that we don’t have to take on a risk of something we may not be good at doing. Professional self-preservation. But most of us just say YES to almost everything and add it to our plate, right?
- Saying YES to everything. Guilty? Raise your hand… Sometimes we say yes to too many things. We are people-pleasers. It’s in our nature and it’s what most of us do on a daily basis. But we say yes and we say yes and we say yes…. And it piles up. And then everytime you say yes, you think this… CLICK
- When you say YES to everything, you end up trying to multitask.
- Show of hands if you have been called (or consider yourself) a “GOOD MULTI-TASKER”? That’s a badge of honor for most of us and certainly a badge of honor for a generation we have (at least on our campus) that wants to DO ALL THE THINGS.
- We pride ourselves on multi-tasking. But what we are actually doing is task-switching. We can’t actually do multiple things at once. Clifford Nass (Faculty @ Stanford & founder of the Communication between Humans and Interactive Media (CHIMe) Lab. We see people multi-tasking – working on stuff while watching TV, while talking, playing games, reading email, Facebook, etc. Classic psychology says that’s impossible, so how do we think we can do it? He studied “high multitaskers” or those who are constantly doing many things at one time when it comes to media. So they assumed that high multitaskers would do well with their tests. They assumed high multitaskers would be great at filtering – getting rid of irrelevant info to be able to pay attention to multiple things at once. They thought high multitaskers would be good at keeping info in their head nicely and neatly organized. They thought high multitaskers would be efficient at switching from one task to another. They were wrong on all accounts – they found that multitaskers were terrible at all aspects of multitasking! What Nass’s study found was that this is reason for concern. Raising generations who are taught to try to multi-task, but if multi-tasking actually makes us perform more poorly are we getting worse at the basics. We’re getting worse at filtering out irrelevant info; worse at organizing info and going from one thing to another – OUCH. And the work they’ve done shows that we’re actually getting worse at analytic reasoning because of this constant bouncing between thought patterns. And there was no difference based on gender and most importantly for us, even college students struggle with this. In one interview I saw with him they did a study with the interviewer. The interviewer was watched all day and analyzed and at the end of the day he hadn’t spent more than three consecutive minutes on a single task. Multitasking is forced on us. We must answer email within 15 minutes; we keep 10 tabs open on our browsers, we skim articles, we only listen to parts of presentations (wink wink), texting and driving… The exception for multi-tasking is when a physical activity that you have done very often and are good at, then you can do two things at once. For instance, walking and talking. But even that has issues – people walk into sign posts and doors while walking and on their cell phone all the time!
- STEP ONE: Accept it and acknowledge your problem. 80/20 rule got this on BrainWise.com – 20% of the work you do gives 80% of the impact and effectiveness. So 1/5th of what you do is the important stuff. Recognize what’s important and focus on it. Batch processing – I get sucked into this all the time where I start looking at email and then just answer them as they come in. During Room Selection time in the spring I joke about “live emailing” people all night long. That’s unproductive and unhealthy and really means that I’m working on staff evals or important documents while reading and responding to emails every 2 minutes. Not good. So batch your time – you’ll schedule 30 minutes to read & respond to emails a couple times a day. Concentrated time – this is sort of that idea about batch processing, but batching is about clustering small tasks. Concentrated time is about setting aside more than 2 minutes to focus on a task. 20 minutes to draft that letter. 30 minutes to prep a form, etc. Close your door, close email, etc.
- These are two words that I think we associate with being BUSY but often mistakenly use interchangeably. I know lots of professionals who work REALLY HARD but can only really be effective on a few kinds of projects or tasks. We’ll work to define capacity here in a minute, but it’s an important distinction… And what happens when we think we’re working hard? CLICK
- What’s been ingrained in most of us since we were kids? And this is the cheap shot we always take at millennials, but there’s some truth to it. And I’m not even mad about it… but when we work hard we have this perception that we are the best. That we are working harder than anyone else. But “WORKING HARD” doesn’t mean that you are doing things effectively, probably not efficiently, and it certainly doesn’t automatically mean you are doing things in alignment with institutional mission or professional competencies or values.
- We get stuck in the rut of thinking that we are trapped in this zero sum game. I only have so many hours to work and therefore if I focus on this task, something else must suffer. And there’s some truth to this if we’re trying to stay healthy – you can just add and add and add if it means more time spent working. But framing our task-completion and to-do lists as WORKING HARD leaves us short on maximizing our potential.
- The binary is that I’m either busy or I’m not. Not “I’m like 50% full right now” – it’s all or nothing. Or a zero sum approach. I can’t take on X unless I give up Y because there’s only ONE me.
- RULE NUMBER ONE OF LISTENING TO A PRESENTATION: Always believe a ven diagram. Instant credibility. TALENT – the things you do well. The things your team does well. Whether it’s innate or learned, the talent you have is where you likely want to focus. RESOURCES – not just money. But time, energy, other people, etc. OPPORTUNITIES – the chances you are given to lead, to manage, to coordinate, to function as a leader. Throw those things together and…. (Be ready to be wowed by my PowerPoint skills)…
- 9bc693 color code
- I firmly believe this. As an introvert it’s hard, but relationships really are the thing. Students are our main thing and our job is clearly to keep the main thing the main thing. But the other main thing that helps us keep the main thing the main thing is relationships with colleagues. Relationships with students, relationships with campus partners, with colleagues, etc. All of those things will contribute to our ability to focus on capacity-building. How do you LEVERAGE (in the best way possible) those relationships to understand your capacity. Prioritizing the things that will insure that you build relationships you need to help you succeed is vital.
- Do the crappy stuff first. I just wanted to use the poop emoji in a presentation, but this is actually something I live and work by. Do the crappy stuff first – dig into the difficult stuff that you don’t love because it allows you to focus on it when you have focus and you’ll stay motivated because getting the tough stuff done first will allow you to focus on the stuff you thrive on.
- Cell phone updates are all about being faster and better, but less about design. There are not tremendous changes in design, right? Maybe a bit bigger or a new curve, but rarely about fundamental shift in design. I want you to focus on design – being an architect of your day… so that leads us to the activity. Like the Debbie Millman quote I shared earlier: “Busy is a decision. You don't find the time to do things... You MAKE the time to do things.”
- Cell phone updates are all about being faster and better, but less about design. There are not tremendous changes in design, right? Maybe a bit bigger or a new curve, but rarely about fundamental shift in design. Right? I want you to focus on design – being an architect of your day… so that leads us to the activity. Spend just FIVE minutes starting this…
- Flip it over and just check this out with me…