Everyone is busy. I don’t know about you but if I ask anyone these days how they are, at least in Britain, 90% of people will respond that they are busy. Busy with work, busy with life, busy with jobs at home, busy busy busy. In fact, we take it further, if someone is NOT busy busy busy, then we might consider them to be lazy. At some point in the past, this idea of being productive, of being efficient, grew in it’s prominence in our minds and changed in our understanding of what it means. And so, being busy and productive has come to dominate the lives of so many of us. So, I want to briefly say to us all, myself very much included in this, Yes…you are very productive….but have you missed the point???
Life reminds me of one those Pay 2 win phone games at times. You know the ones. The first bit is easy and you get a tonne of points to upgrade with. The next bit is seemingly just as easy and so you upgrade more and more. But there comes a point, where the difficulty increase and the cost of upgrading increases to the point where the levels are impossible without either paying for the upgrades with real money or playing for days to earn enough points to upgrade. Our skills at planning, our efficiency, our time management, even our knowledge, understanding and capability within our work area and expertise grow and we notice the difference. But then, the demands us grow with it and we are forced to be more efficient, more productive.
At every point we get better, the demands seem to get bigger.
I once knew some whose email address reflected that phrase — if you want something done quickly, ask a busy person.
I sometimes wonder if in our generation we have made an idol of being productive, of being efficient. I sometimes wonder therefore if we have missed the point. Here is a famous story. If you have heard it before, you can skip over it. If not it is worth a read:
There was once a businessman standing on the beach in a small fishing village. Looking out to sea, he noticed a local fisherman rowing his boat to shore. The businessman was impressed by all the fat, fresh fish that the fisherman had caught.
When the fisherman arrived on land, the businessman complimented his catch. Yet he was curious.
“How long does it take you to catch your fish?” he asked.
“About a few hours,” the fisherman replied.
“So why don’t you go out and catch more?” the businessman asked.
“I have more than enough to feed my family,” he fisherman said.
“So what do you do for the rest of the day?” the businessman wanted to know.
The fisherman smiled.
“Everyday I wake early and I catch fish for a bit. After that, I go home and I play with my children. In the afternoon I take a siesta with my wife. At night I meet my friends in the village. We chat, we play guitar, we share a few beers. ”
The businessman furrowed his brow
“Look,” he explained. “I have a degree in business management. I can help you. From now on, you should spend more time at sea so you can catch more fish. With the proceeds from that, you can buy a bigger boat and catch even more fish. Using the money you earn from a bigger boat, you can then get a fleet of boats and hire men to operate them. You can cut out the middleman and start selling your fish directly to processors. You can even open your own cannery and eventually move your company to a big city like New York or Los Angeles. There you’ll be able to expand your enterprise.”
“And then?” The fisherman said.
“That’s the best part,” the businessman said. “Once you’ve made enough, you can announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public. You’ll make millions! With all that money, you can retire. You can move to a nice quiet area, maybe a small village by the beach. With all your free time you’ll be able to play with your kids. You can take siestas the afternoon with your wife. At night you can meet your friends in the village. You can chat, play guitar, share a few beers!”
There is much that we could draw from this story. I want to say this. Being more and more productive. Getting more and more done. Achieving more and more success is not the purpose of life.
We believe that being more productive is objectively better than being less productive. Always. But why is it?
I will always remember talking to my grandad about his time at work. He was a company secretary for a large UK based insurance company. He worked directly with the Board of Directors. Towards the end of his career things changed a bit, but for the bulk of it, there were established boundaries. It was understood, by everyone, that work time fitted within certain hours of the day and it was inappropriate for it to routinely expand beyond this.
Scroll forwards 50 years and a friend overhears a monthly appraisal meeting in a café. The manager was saying to his employee that he thought it was great that he played football on a Thursday night, that it was fine to leave work early at 7pm that day, as long as he worked until 10 or 11pm a couple of other nights to make up the time.
Somewhere along the way, we have drifted into some big errors here. We’ve given over more and more of our lives to the ‘god’ of busyness, the ‘god’ of being productive. It is a ‘god’ that promises us great things but delivers us stress, anxiety, burnout and potentially regret in later life over all the things we sacrificed on its altar.
So, my plea, to myself as well, as that we turn away from this. You do not need to consider how to be productive all of the time. Sometimes it is not worth the stress or the effort of trying to be a bit more efficient. It’s ok to go home leaving work unfinished, because that’s not the full sum of the purpose of your life.
Yes, there will be times and seasons where being busy and having a lot to do is the reality. But if this goes on too long, something probably needs to change.
It is also worth recognising that we are all different. I used to work with someone very different to me. He always wanted to be as efficient as possible with everything all of the time, to get his work, his jobs done as quickly as he could to maximise his time for rest. That’s great. I was very different. That approach used to exhaust me far more and cause a great deal more stress, meaning that my need for rest became greater than even the extra rest time gained could cover. Far better for me to work slower, take longer, and have less time to rest. But the time I did have would be more than sufficient.
Yes…you are very productive…but have you missed the point? Would you, and everyone around you, be far better off being less productive and having more capacity for the rest of life, the other important things as well.
Yes… you are very productive…but have you missed the point? Is your striving after greater efficiency, actually causing you more harm than the extra time gained is granting benefit?
Yes…you are very productive…but have you missed the point? Are you working hard to secure yourself a future, that would be available now, with a different approach and mindset?
