Can’t You See I’m Busy? (Doing What is another matter).

 I make no secret of the fact that I dislike being in an office. In the years that I’ve been around the work force, the least productive moments were inevitably away from an office. From what I’ve noticed, offices are places where counterproductive people gather to hinder others to justify their sense of superiority regardless of whether their actions benefit the organization they are working for.

This can be put down to what I’ve called the “Cult of Busy,” where people become so busy with their station in life that they don’t actually do anything. Being busy is no longer about having a lot of things to do but about showing people how important you are. This cult like worship of busy is particularly bad in bureaucracies, where profit and loss are a minor part of the organisation’s purpose and unfortunately, small time enterprises are not immune from this symptom either. This is particularly in enterprises where the entrepreneur has reached a stage where the enterprise needs a few employees and the presence of those employees serves more as a boost to the founder’s ego rather than to get work done.

What happens when you get an enterprise that is part of the cult of busy? Well, you end up with a situation where very little actually gets done or whatever gets done is actually the arse covering work rather than the actual work.

This was brought home to me when I had to post some letters and walked past an escalator, which was not functioning.

 

 It was clear that whoever was in charge had covered their behinds by ensuring that the public knew that “maintenance works” were in progress. However, there was no maintenance work taking place at all. This was at around four in the afternoon, which is a time when people can still do maintenance work. Yet, there was not a soul in sight and the escalator in question hadn’t been touched at all.

This is, unfortunately, not the only time I’ve seen a sign for maintenance work put up without any visible sign of maintenance work actually being done.

How does the cult of busy fit in? Well, if you were to call up the people in charge of the situation, there is a good chance that you will find yourself being put through a very long line of options before you get to speak to someone who might pretend to attend to the issue of hand. The best part is that the busy people hiding behind a million options don’t have direct phone lines or emails, so should you require them again, you have to go through the whole process again. One of the worst offenders of such modern efficiency are our local telcos, who have lots of physical shops where you can buy phones and phone lines but have no ability to solve basic issues – you have to call the hotline. You’re left wonder what exactly the people in the shops doing?

One of the best or worst examples of the cult of busy was the Land Transport Authority (LTA). During the pandemic, they made it clear that they would not entertain anyone at their headquarters unless they had made an appointment. However, to make an appointment with the officer I needed to see, I needed to go through a hotline and common email. Somehow the best you could do was to wait for the officer to receive the message that you had called or emailed the hotline but because the officer in question was so busy, I ended up having to go to their headquarters to demand to see him. Even then, I was informed that the security guards didn’t have the access to the officer inside the building they were guarding. They had to call the hotline.

We live in an age where most things can be done with a push of a button. Part of the reason for this high level of development was done to save us time. I do most of whatever research I do on a laptop. Thanks to Google, I just search for things and filter through what I need. Process can take me a few hours. In the days before the internet, I would have had to spend days in a library or even interviewing people.

Yet, despite all these advances to save us time, we’re finding ways to become busier. Instead of freeing us up to focus on getting the job done, we find reasons not to do the job. Posting letters for example can be a very strenuous task when you involve “busy” people.

If Covid has done anything for us, it should be to show us how valuable our time is. Instead of trying to return to “normal” of being busy for the sake of being busy, let’s refocus and look at how we can finish the job in the quickest possible way. Let us fix the damn escalators instead of focusing on telling people that the escalators are under maintenance. If we do that, we might actually make progress and be the smart futuristic city that we’re claiming to be.