"Just Too Busy' Series - 3. Being accountable, but not in the way you think

In this episode, we explore a crucial aspect of being busy: accountability for the negative behaviors that stem from constant busyness. While being busy is often praised and rewarded, it can lead to burnout and detrimental effects on both personal and professional levels.

Key Insights:

The Illusion of Productivity: Being busy is often seen as a positive trait, leading to praise and promotions. However, it’s crucial to differentiate between being busy and being productive. Busy people may not always be prioritizing the right tasks.

Accountability Beyond Tasks: True accountability isn’t just about meeting deadlines. It involves taking responsibility for behaviors that result from being overly busy. This includes recognizing when busyness leads to poor decision-making and emotional outbursts.

Impact on Others: When you’re constantly busy, you may expect others to match your pace, which is unrealistic and unfair. Not everyone thrives under constant pressure, and high expectations can create a toxic work environment.

Strategic Oversight: Busyness often prevents you from stepping back to evaluate whether you’re focusing on the right things. Without strategic oversight, you might be caught in a cycle of motion without meaningful movement.

Emotional Control: Being overly busy can lead to exhaustion and emotional instability, resulting in anger and blame. These emotions can harm your relationships and the overall atmosphere in your organization.

Looking Ahead: This is part three of a series on being too busy. In the next video, we’ll explore how to shift from merely spending time to investing time wisely. We’ll discuss practical solutions to overcome the challenges of busyness and improve both personal and organizational outcomes.

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Transcript

0:05

Being busy. Great. Right. Everybody wants to be busy. It's really positive. You've got lots of things done. People. Praise you. Wonderful, fantastic, great job, Bob. Here's your promotion for being the busiest guy around? The reality is as busy as can get you to a certain point in your career. I spoke last time about an addiction to being business and the dangers that it presents to you. And those around you. Today. I want to talk about. Accountability and accountability for some of the bad behaviors that come from being too busy. So let's talk about that. Then I used the word accountability there. And for many of us, we know, we think we know what accountability means, right? Accountability means doing this things you say you're going to do. All right. Setting deadlines, meeting deadlines, doing the stuff that you need to do. And the reality is, is that definition of accountability is. surface level definition at best. Or talk in the next video about actually deadlines and why there can be a dangerous thing and then an organization. But today I want to talk about a different type of accountability. That's accountability for behavior. And we talked last time about being busy. And how that can be addictive. But I want to talk about today is some of the bad results that could come from being too busy a lot of the time. Okay. Some of the things that cause challenges in the organization, if you, or many people in your organization in busy. And the most obvious of them is the kind of expectation you have that everybody else is going to be as busy. And as productive as you, and it's simply not going to be the case for everybody. If you're super busy all the time, you've got high expectations that everybody else's, you're working long hours, hours, maybe your expectations are that everybody else works long hours. Not everybody's built like that. Not everybody can do that. Not everybody gets the buzz from being busy. Like you do. Everybody's a bit different in that regard. And also what can happen again, if you're super busy, you don't take the time to step back and look at the bigger picture. Are you doing the right things? Are we moving in the right direction or am I just creating motion and motion motion for the sake of it by being busy? Am I changing my mind a lot of the time. Am I drawn by different? Ideas or different ways of thinking. Am I spending really spending time looking at the strategic direction of where I need to be going? Or am I saying things to myself? Like I'm just too busy. I can't, I haven't got time to do that. The reality is, is that again, poor behavior. If you're not looking to the future or larger, more strategic objectives, that's not in good service of the organization. And it's certainly not good in good service of you. Okay. It's about taking accountability time for your behavior. But often it can be worse. So people are often busy, have all struggled to control their emotions a lot of the time because they're tired. They're exhausted. Often they're burned out and they struggle to really control emotions, emotions like anger. other emotions, which are, you know, protecting things underneath, like blame. You can blame others for not doing the things that you want. It's easy to go to those places of anger and blame when you're tired and exhausted, it's much easier for your brain to go to those places rather than actually really trying to see what's going on. Busy-ness can increase the chances and the likelihoods of those behaviors being like that in your organization. Do you want those. Emotions to be present in your organization. Are they a positive thing? Anger can work in the short term for getting things done, but ultimately longterm, you know, it's not a successful way to manage a business by getting angry at people. So taking accountability for the behaviors that come from being super busy and focusing on getting a lot of things done versus getting the right things done can cause real detrimental effects to the organization, and to you. This is part three of a series about being too busy. In part four, I'm going to talk about, well, how do we change this? How do we look at the future? How do we spend time better? So rather than thinking about spending time, how do we invest our time in the right things? So what are the solutions to getting over this busy challenge that we're facing?