Busyness is Holding Your Professional Service Organization Back – Here’s How to Fix it

In his book Upstream, Dan Heath opens with a fable of two friends picnicking near a river. A drowning child draws their attention. Upon saving that child, another child in distress appears. And then another.

The friends run back and forth to the bank with rescued children until, finally, one friend begins to walk upriver from their location. “Where are you going?” says the first friend as she pulls another child from the water.

“To stop whoever is throwing all these kids in the river!” says the second.

Our days in the office can be just like this story. We spend our days answering emails, paying attention to the pings of Slack or Teams, and rushing from one client emergency to another. Unfortunately, this busyness pulls our attention away from the important work that needs doing – like putting in the systems upstream that prevent these emergencies in the first place.

What’s Behind Busyness?

It’s easy to look around and find something or someone to blame for the little tasks that keep us occupied. While it’s true that there are a million tasks and interruptions that take us away from what really needs to be done, we need to start an exploration into busyness by looking in the mirror.

We’re our own worse enemy in this, and in fact, busyness can be addicting, similar to caffeine or nicotine. Our brains betray us by releasing the neurotransmitter dopamine when we expect a reward. Research shows that we perceive answering an email or even the ding of our messaging app as rewarding.

But dopamine is short-lived in the body, and soon we’re seeking the next reward. Many of our larger and more important projects and tasks take time to complete – the “reward” is delayed.

Of course, it isn’t just our own brains that keep us busy. A lack of time, strained resources, and even a hesitation to change can keep legacy processes and manual tasks cemented in our day-to-day. The result? We run from task, to message, to task, to email, and we feel like we’re too engaged in putting out fires to build a fire truck.

As Heath points out in his book, the problem of bandwidth is where we end up dedicating the time we do have. Heath writes, “Researchers have found that when people experience scarcity – of money or time or mental bandwidth – the harm is not that the big problems crowd out the little ones. The harm is that the little ones crowd out the big ones.”

Breaking the Busyness Cycle

So how do we get out of this hamster wheel of busyness? Several strategies can help you identify your most significant opportunities for improvement and start buying yourself back some time.

Get Out of the “Tunnel”

When the small tasks make it hard to see the forest for the trees, experts call that “tunneling”. You become so focused on the few things that you can get done that you cease to look at the bigger picture.

The solution is an easy one but can seem like the hardest to implement – you need to take a step back. Deliberate pauses in your day that allow you to reflect and step away can give you a clearer view of what’s really going on. Try taking a break of just a minute or two every hour, and focus on something that isn’t work-related. Take a short walk, let go of what’s next on your list, and just breathe.

Find the Pain Points

It’s hard to fix something if you don’t know what the problem actually is. Identifying the tasks or processes that are eating away at your time is key to create effective change.

Take a few minutes at lunch, before or after a meeting, or at the end of the day to reflect on what made the day busy. Don’t rely on just your recollection of your day, though. Use a time-tracking system, like Toggl, Timing, or even a device like Timeular, to give you hard data about where you are spending your time.

Call in the Cavalry

Making changes outside of your own task list requires assistance and advocates – people who are impacted by slowed processes and the busyness bug themselves. Discuss the issues you see within your own day and those that you’ve identified as part of internal processes with your leader and co-workers. They may have ideas that can help or can spearhead change that will improve your workflow and that of others as well.

Of course, when you’re in the middle of legacy processes, tunneling may be something that your entire organization is experiencing. If so, it may be time to call in outside expertise. These experts can bring in an objective view of your systematic or organizational roadblocks and give you ideas on process changes and tools that decrease busyness and increase efficiency.

Conclusion

The cycle of busyness is a hard one to break. Doing so requires that we fight both our own brain chemistry and the legacy processes that slow us down. Taking a break and gathering data will give you a sense of perspective on the day-to-day, but you may need additional help to see the bigger picture.

Top Step can be that help. With our Business Efficiency Assessment workshop, we work with you to explore the goals and processes, evaluate potential improvements and their benefits, and make recommendations for implementation. Contact us to get a complimentary 30-minute review to see if a Business Efficiency Assessment is right for you.