Monday, January 03, 2022

Time to Remove the Cult of Busy

 

It’s the second day of the year and I’m about to start work tomorrow. Unfortunately, it looks like Singapore will, in the new year, aim towards getting people back to the office and the concept of nine-to-six will be back. I describe this is an “unfortunate” event because everyone else will be celebrating the “return to normal,” when the fact of the matter was that normal was actually unnatural and instead of using the pandemic to create a new and more sustainable normal, we’ve merely been trying to ride things out so that things could get back to normal.

I make no secret of the fact that I detest the office as an institution. The very thought of sitting in an office, looking at files and attending meetings fills me with a powerful sense of self-loathing.  If we are truly honest with ourselves, we will realise that the office is a place for the worst forms of social congregation masquerading as a place of work. If I look at my own experiences, I have achieved nothing note worthy in an office. Everything that I take pride in was done when I was a freelancer. If I am honest, the only thing I achieved in seven years of an office job in the financial district was not ramming my forehead into the noses of the species that thrives in an office.

One of the things I detest most about the office and all things associated with the office is the fact that they are part of a cult – namely the “Cult of Busy.” This is an insane cult which worships “being busy” as if it were the be all and end all of existence.

Now, I have nothing against being busy. If you look at certain things like the activity on a ship or an aircraft, you’ll realise that being busy is a good thing. It genuinely requires a lot of activity to keep a ship moving at sea or a plane moving in the air. In the restaurant, being busy was a good thing because it meant that you had plenty of customers, which meant that there was revenue coming in for the day and that in turn means that the boss has the money to pay your salary.

What I’m against, is when “busy” becomes a cult. This particularly rife in the professional fields like law and accountancy where staff are expected to work 12 hours a day and 365 days a year. Now, to an extent, this is understandable. If you are a lawyer going for trial, you do need to prepare vast amounts of documents and quite often, it’s the juniors who have to pull “all-nighters” because its part of the learning curve.

However, you know something is wrong when people whom you would assume are capable of intelligence start bragging about the hours they put in and how they don’t sleep and don’t have time for other facets of life. If you walk around any given office, you’ll find that the one who gets praised is the guy who comes in “early” and leaves “late.”

I admit that I was part of this cult. My first job for a small agency worked me 24/7. Ex-wife hated it and threw regular tantrums. I loved the job. Saw a great future and threw myself into the 24/7 cult believing that I would grow as a professional and a person. To be fair to my ex, she actually had a point. After five months on the job, I quit because I reached a stage where I could no longer string a sentence when writing copy and I lost the ability to service clients properly.

However, I was proud of my ability to “work the hours,” that I actually mentioned it in the interview when I was offered a two-week internship at RappCollins DDB. The reply from the boss was “That’s great because sometimes we can get insanely busy but I’m more interested in the work in the hours rather than the hours you work.”

Those words of wisdom have stuck with me. When I left the agency world to be a freelancer at the end of 2005, I suddenly appreciated that many of my “busy” hours were actually wasted. As a freelancer I tried to move away from billing for my time and charging for the results that I achieved because I had no name and therefore my time had no value, so I had to show the world that I could get results. For the record, I still believe that you should charge for results rather than time spent.

When I entered the semi-legal profession of liquidations, I started becoming “busy” again. It was important to be busy because revenue was dependent on being busy. Time-sheets were a mantra of being “professional.” I remember a lawyer from a big firm telling me, “Spending time is not a problem for us – time is what we sell you.”

That truism is one of the biggest issues with “professionalism.” Instead of encouraging “professionals” to solve problems, it encourages the “professional” to blow problems out of proportion because, as this lawyer pointed out – they are selling you their time rather than their expertise. “Professionals” are not experts who can achieve better outcomes than a client but very busy people.” Since they’re paid to be busy, they become good at being busy.

What nobody questions whether that “busy” is actually going towards achieving the outcome that the client needs. So, you have a situation where people brag about how many hours, they spent in the office rather than what they actually do.

For me, the productivity killing powers at the office or the church to the cult of busy were reinforced by the lock down in April 2020. I managed to produce things free of interruptions, ego management and the challenges of having the post letters. I’ve done my best to avoid entering the office since then and avoid any opportunity to brag about being busy because as long as I was out of the office, I actually managed to do things. As someone on Linkedin pointed out:

 


 Normal wasn’t healthy and in an age where we have advanced so far, there is no reason to be stuck at the Church of the Cult of Busy. We have the necessary tools to be productive at work and still have time for the important things in life. Isn’t time we stopped being slaves to a pointless cult?

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Maira Gall