Busyness Hamster Wheel: Forgotten Productivity Advice For The Busy

Busy? I Get It!

Feels valid. Looks rational. Appears opportunistic. Seems productive. Are you a busy person? Do you find yourself juggling tasks—meetings, paperwork, emails, calls, doing dishes or laundry, checking metrics, buying supplies?

You’re busy. No denying that. But being busy doesn’t mean you’re achieving meaningful progress. Emails, calls, paperwork, meetings, keeping tidy, reorganizing—these repetitive activities don’t make for headway. What are you, a professional email handler, phone caller, floor mopper, paperwork filler, and meeting attendee?

Feels Wonderful

Hammering nails isn’t the same as building palettes. Or structures. Or skyscrapers. Worthwhile things don’t come from doing things.

Although, swinging the hammer into nail after nail feels awesome. You feel accomplished, satisfied, and productive. You feel gratified, content with yourself, and others can’t disagree.

Society Agrees.

Depending on the culture, you might even be rewarded for it, as if your time is worthy and in demand. Entire workforces are judged on activity levels rather than the quality of work. F**king horrendous.

Huge. We have the word “busywork” for a reason. No, just because you got unimportant tasks out of the way—calls, paperwork, mopping the floor—doesn’t make you productive! Not one crumb.

Knew It

When do you do those tasks? Let me guess—randomly, while procrastinating, multitasking, or on breaks. Aha! The problemo: doing things isn’t the same as getting things done.

When You Do…

You’re most often performing tasks with no structure. You’re reacting to the tasks as they come up, rather than proactively and strategically ticking the boxes.

You bring your concentration on urgent, but not important, tasks. Massive difference. Urgent, annoying, often stressful tasks can crowd out the significant ones. You find yourself in a cycle of dealing with crises without progress towards the pivotal project. Yikes.

Priority Evaporation

When you do, you aren’t backed by a concrete base, like priorities, strategy, analytics, and task significance. You just waste time on low- rather than high-impact tasks. No bueno for business.

Here’s the catch. When you get things done, you systemize tasks, plan, prioritize, organize, and contribute to meaningful means. You dig the time for monumental tasks which actually matter, suffer less stress, anxiety, and disorganization as a result.

Busyness Hamster Wheel

Ultimately, you get s**t done. You can boil the soup for hours on end, stirring those veggies until they become mush. Or, boil it for an hour, get it done, and move on.

People enter busyness hamster wheels because they’re instantly gratifying. Junk food, drugs, alcohol, and smoking is also instantly gratifying, you know?

Numbers Don’t Lie

Can’t fake productivity I’m afraid. Busyness stacks up. You may not know how little you get done, but your boss, his boss, and the overseeing faculty, they know.

Plus, akin to instantaneous pleasures, the satisfaction evaporates. Disappears and leaves a cartoonish cloud with “poof!”. What are you left with?

Busyness Side Effects

To add to the trivial progress you made… Chronic stress, frustration, mental exhaustion, and eventually burnout from you constantly “doing”.

You aren’t “busy” sometimes. You’re in the rat cage, on the human-sized hamster wheel, running on all fours. The busyness trap turns into a vicious cycle of stress, lowered efficiency, and even more busyness.

More, More, Less?

The multitasking and juggling I spoke of decrease the quality of your work. Can’t attend to fifteen different tasks without Elon’s latest chip!

Thus that results in more errors. More rushing, more errors, more coming back to fix those errors, forming another negative feedback loop—oh no.

Bad Stuff

In the end, you’re left with howling, empty pockets, a wrinkly forehead, a fatter body, a higher blood pressure, an unhappier family, worse sleep, and more notifications than your brain can handle. Busyness rat race.

Yet, that begs the question—if busyness is so negative, why do people do it? Isn’t it commonsensical to avoid poison?

Addiction-Like

No. Alcohol is poison—we still drink it. In truth, we drink it for identical reasons. Alcohol releases dopamine, creates a sense of accomplishment, and forms a feedback loop. So do small, easy, repetitive tasks.

The immediate reward of “finishing” tasks begins to overshadow larger, monumental projects which actually matter. More time invested, less things done! Productivity vaccine!

Social Proof

You’ll find drinking friends. You’ll try to match their pace. You’ll try to measure up to their alcoholism—your colleagues’ and peers’ busyness is contagious.

Don’t want to be the “weird one”. With the crew all tipsy, their faces red, their bodies stinky, you can’t not keep up with them! When everyone at work looks busy, you’ll do your best to not be seen as lazy or “unproductive”.

Fear Of Missing Out

The crew won’t leave you at that. Saturday for starters. Weekend for warriors. Can’t miss out. Transfers straight to busyness—can’t miss out on tasks; you try to do everything, and as a result do nothing. Ouch.

Ultimately, the hole you dug out for yourself becomes hard to claw out of. Your brain is overloaded with the addiction, the phone calls, the emails, the management of countless tasks, and your ability to prioritize plummets. No strategy, no planning, nothing done, no value in you as an employee.

Doing Things?

Yeah. Doing things isn’t the same as getting things done. Know the difference. Pick a time of day, for each if needed, and batch these suckers, these time vampires—meetings, emails, phone calls, paperwork, social media, organizing the workspace, managing and delegating to others, minor household chores, browsing the internet, shopping, responding to notifications.

Batch. Forget the task for the day, and get all of it done in one sprint. You’ll discover “hidden” time for the notable, high-impact activities, which actually align with long-term progress. Work on those.

As an ending note, learn to say no. Decline tasks that aren’t the priority. Don’t answer those calls straight away—urgency and importance are different. Say no to non-essential commitments, tasks, decision-making, and problem-solving. Protect your time. You don’t get long.