In a knowledge economy, busyness is the enemy!
None of our careers happen in a vacuum. We all have constraints: lack of experience, education, where you live, how much $ you need to make, having the freedom to pick your kids up after school, etc. We also have hidden systemic constraints that affect our work lives, for example, a glass ceiling. One of the hidden factors that reduces our ability to perform deep work is busyness. Knowledge workers in this country have been afflicted with a horrible sickness. They have all come down with “busy-ites”. This is a terrible condition that affects many of us. Common side-effects are: answering emails and texts at strange hours of the night, constantly attending worthless meetings, and responding to every social media inquiry that comes our way.
Why is this expected of us? Why do we continue running on this hamster wheel? Most of us do it. Why?
IMHO, there are two main reasons, 1- biological (our old friend the brain) 2- poor role definition.
Biological- like most learned behaviors this pattern begins in the brain. We as humans LOVE to receive shots of dopamine. Fortunately/unfortunately our major dopamine pathway regulates reward-motivated behavior. In fact, many types of rewards we receive as humans increase the level of dopamine in our bodies.
Somewhere along our careers many of us were praised for being busy, or for sending that follow-up email at 1:30 AM, or for just keeping a frantic work schedule. That praise released a tiny bit of dopamine into your body. And because we as humans are addicted to our own dopamine, we repeat behaviors that provide us more, and more, and more.
Unfortunately/fortunately dopamine chasing is hardwired into us. So because of this, we work, or more precisely, we work in a visible way, in order to receive praise.
We also work this way because knowledge workers, and their managers, suffer from poor role definitions. In fact, we often have no clue about what is expected of us in our jobs. To quote Dr. Cal Newport from his best selling book, Deep Work, “In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity, doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.” Between the shot of dopamine and the lack of clear direction, today’s knowledge worker has two big obstacles between her and deep work.
Because busyness creep is so prevalent, there is a single piece of paper taped to my secondary monitor in all of my offices. This paper is the first thing I see when I sit down, and contains the words I look at constantly during the day. It simply reads, “There is no value in busy work.”
Some argue that busyness is their way to fight boredom. I say boredom is your friend, and boredom is especially your friend compared to both busyness and how you are self-conditioning your brain when you reach for social media to fight your boredom.