Busyness To Business: Chasing To An Endless Mirage

Yatin Samant, Founder, Powerful Perspectives

Yatin brings with him proven track record of business results of more than 30 years of Corporate working experience in Sales, Marketing, Business development and General management across diversed industries

I remember reading somewhere that all of us die underleveraged to the extent of 95 per­cent. Only 5 percent of our abilities are real­ized, primarily due to factor that we don’t have time to discover our full potential. Worse still many are blissfully ignorant that it is due to our ‘busy’ state of mind, we fail to rise to the full potential. Hence getting beyond ‘busyness’ becomes akin to chasing an endless mirage.

Busyness’ is a silent killer. Busyness is probably the biggest Corporate Disease without us realising how highly crippling, debilitating, and contagious it is and appears to be non-curable.

"Getting busy is like getting into a marshy land, the more you stay there, the deeper you will sink"

Being high on ‘busyness’ is like falling into a trap which one finds tough to come out of. Similar to what Abhimanyu in Mahabharat encountered, when he was trapped in a Chakravyuh. Getting busy is like getting into a marshy land, the more you stay there, the deeper you will sink.

Busyness leaves an individual fire fighting constant­ly in a Reactive mode - where tomorrow is no better than today. Since future can only be created while in Proac­tive mode ‘Busy people’ cannot cre­ate Future for Self or for the Organ­isation they work for simply because they do not have time for it!

Busyness has serious, lasting consequences on everybody

• On Your Career
– Non achievement, Loss of credibility, reputation
– Out of reckoning, non dependable

• On Your Organization
– Slow pace of performance, Missed opportunities, Inefficiency

• On Your Colleagues
– De-energising, unmotivating, uninspiring

• On an Individual
– Guilt, anxiety, insecurity
– Work life balance, health, energy

There is a BIG difference between Leaders who are successful and those who are not. The former are ‘Meaningfully engaged’ while the later are just ‘Busy’. Meaningful en­gagement requires connecting with a Purpose, Busy people are trapped into a maze of Activities.

So is Busyness real or imagined? Is it a state of matter or a state of mind?

• Busyness Does Not Exist on its Own – it prevails in the absence of an organized mind! The clutter in­side i s not c ircumstantial. It i s n ot what work or how much work you do but “How” you do it which makes you ‘busy’.

Busyness Define show Organised You Are
• Busyness implies that you feel / see your resources (Time) falling short of your demand (Task) & since it happens against your wish, you feel stressed. This resource shortfall is not necessarily due to total quan­tum shortage but often is a prioritization/ allocation & time efficiency issue. ( Process time v/s Waiting time v/s Idle time )

• In effect, state of busyness can be directly linked to how organized your work is. Consider a library which has a large number of books (say around 1 crore). Accessing the desired book may not take you even a minute. Now imagine that all these 1 Crore books are taken out, jumbled up & scattered on a surface. Imagine the time needed to access your book. Here you will spend much more time in accessing than reading when in reality time alloca­tion has to be the reverse.

• Human mind can be imagined ex­actly like above. First case (Library) is an organised mind, second case (scattered books) is a reflection of an unorganised mind. As leaders we need to spend less time in accessing & more time in processing to create business advantage.

If it is disadvantageous, why let it persist?

Solution
Fortunately ‘Busyness’ is neither a non curable disease nor a per­manent disability, though only for those who are aware of the trap and are desirous of coming out of it.

Since busyness is not real, you can come out it and help is available. Since the roots of this ‘disease’ are in the mind, solution starts from re­orientation of mind .

• Get rid of the ‘gravity factor’ (get­ting stuck in status quo ) – Start with Your RESOLVE
– Knowledge, Understanding , Realisation , Implementation

• Transform to Structured Approach
– Use Method, Plan than be adhoc. Proactive than reactive
– Tools: Time Priority plan, D/W/M Chart à Month planner

• Clean up & carry no more Backlog
– Set deadlines, Self manage­ment, Work offsite, come back clean

• Active counselling
– Seek mentor, guidance to come out of the ‘Chakravuyh’ syndrome

So the effort has to be tied in with recognizing what causes ‘busyness’, and about taking de­termined steps to overcome this mind block.