The Difference Between Being Busy and Being Effective

Taking an entire week off from “work” tasks has taught me that productivity can be achieved through different ways. You can be “busy” hosting people, you can be ”busy” on vacation, and you can “busy” maintaining the home. There are many types of busy— but often the word itself is connotated with the scarcity of time.

The problem I have with busy, is that it suggests that you need all the time in the world to do a particular task. We must ‘spend 8 hours a day at work’ to achieve adequate output. We must put an hour or two into our exercise to ‘remain healthy or fit’.

Mind you, just because you feel like time is running out every day, doesn’t mean you’re necessarily being as effective as you could be. We can produce a lot of output given the number of hours we put in a day, but we have to also consider what all the output is adding up towards. A lot of the time, we are consumed by “busy” work. Answering messages, storing, organizing, meetings, and even thinking about the work we haven’t done. So although we may feel ‘busy’, we’re not actually building towards an objective.

Defining Effectiveness in our Daily Life

Being effective in my own definition means that we’re producing or accomplishing something that is on our priority list, in a reasonable time.

Reasonable, meaning that it’s the least amount of time between where the work is mediocre and the work is good. Let me use an example that most people are familiar with.

Let’s say you’re having guests over for dinner. You can easily spend an hour or less tidying up the place—sweeping, vacuuming, taking out the garbage. Your guests would be perfectly satisfied, a. Because their main priority is to spend time with you, not analyze the crevasses of your home.

Now if you are misaligned with your priority, that is spending quality time with your guests and you start to overthink how clean your place is. The following result is you spending 3 hours or the entire day lulling over every single detail, and how shiny the floorboards are. Even though you were “busy” accomplishing what you thought was important, the reality is, that you were far from hitting the effective mark.

I do this with work— a lot. As a writer, they say the most heavy-duty part of the job is the editing. You can spend an hour actually writing an article, but research and editing those can gobble up your entire day. So even though I feel busy throughout the day, the reality is the actual output I’m producing is not optimal for the number of hours I’m putting in.

One way I’ve dealt with this is bringing someone on to perform time-consuming tasks like transcription.

One thing I need to work on is: Doing more with less time. This can look like giving myself strict cut-off times for work. That forces me to reorganize my day and concentrate heavily on getting what I need to get done to stay on track with my schedule.

I’m all about flexibility, but sometimes I admit, I can take the flexibility a bit far. Going back and forth from the gym takes up at least an hour. Lunch, a nap that follows lunch, and recovery from a nap take at least 2 hours. That’s 3 hours already gone. Now if you work a standard 8-hour day, a 3-hour break is a lot, especially added up over a week.

 I need to reorganize my schedule so that there aren’t as many time-sucking instances throughout the day and I encourage you to look at what is eating up your own daily schedule.

Identifying your Own Pitfalls 

People often don’t realize their own flaws or pitfalls until they actually sit down and think about them. I was going through my credit card bill this month and was shocked at how high the bill was considering I thought myself to live pretty frugally.  I then physically noted my monthly recurring expenses as well as miscellaneous ones and realized exactly why the bill was high in two seconds.

The problem is that people often can’t let go of ineffective habits because there are no systems to do so. We recycle not because we love recycling or particularly love the environment, but because recycling has been turned into a system— that’s easier than taking out the trash. The recycling bins are always more colorful, have useful guiding visuals,  and are in our immediate vision than garbage bins (which nowadays require more effort to find in certain buildings ie. schools, condos).

In order to become more effective at work or in our daily life, we must first identify what is eating up our time or causing us to achieve a less optimal output.

Then, we need to give ourselves certain perimeters to work within so that we can fully put our concentration into a small circle of priorities— and find a way to make the tasks in the periphery smaller. People who are ineffective focus 80% of their time on peripheral tasks. The reality is you should be achieving your optimal results with 20% of your time, that is if you focus your energy and time on your center of priority.

What are Your Priorities?

It’s essential that you take time to reflect and realize what your priorities are. Priorities are not equivalent to deadlines. Deadlines are created by a second party or self-imposed, and sometimes, quite randomly. It’s different if you have a specific objective in mind and use deadlines to calibrate when you’re hitting those targets. But throwing weeks, months, or years around with no particular process or calculation in place is likely to lead to a lot of ‘busywork’ in order to meet this proposed deadline.

Identify what you truly value or want in your life. If it’s for better health, are you really hitting that goal by buying workout gear and stocking your fridge with food, yet not actually taking time to go to the gym or cooking? It’s the same concept in so many aspects of our lives. We spend the majority of our time doing the peripheral tasks surrounding the core priority, but not so much in the actual zone of priorities.

Over time, failing to meet our own set priorities + constantly being busy = scarcity of time and stress.

And constant stress can turn into burnout.

After Effects of Working in Our Zone of Priorities

When we start working in our center of priority, we may experience an odd sensation.

Because you’re so used to having your time consumed by other tasks, the shift away from that can be a little disorienting in the beginning. You have time now, which is not what you’re used to. You may even feel ‘unproductive’ and as if you’re not doing as much as ‘you should’.

Remember we’ve been conditioned since a young age that the more we do, the more we get. The reality is it’s not about quantity anymore, but it’s about the quality of your work.

If you can achieve the same or even better type of quality with less time, why wouldn’t you pursue that route?

The problem is that by spreading yourself too thin across too many tasks or projects, the quality for each of those can diminish. It’s better that you focus on what you’re good at and what you can achieve the most with lesser amounts of effort and time than others. Work within your skill range, not against it.

If you suspect you might not be as effective as you would like to be, I encourage you to carve out some time to set out your priorities and compare them to your daily schedule. Identify time gobbling instances and find ways to reduce your time in the periphery and spend more time in the center of priorities.