There is this pervasive idea in our society, where it is thought better that your calendar must be full of meetings and not much else.
There will be entire weeks of back-to-back meetings. Sure, you’re busy, but are you accomplishing anything. Most meetings could be better handled by email, instead of an hour-long conversation.
The other idea is timekeeping. I understand that one has a certain number of hours per day that needs to be spent working. However, when you start keeping records and timesheets, this could potentially be handled poorly.
A task that takes me thirty minutes to complete will keep someone else occupied for an hour. Therefore, the other person’s timesheet looks better simply because they managed eight hours’ worth of work. Whereas my sheet looks worse because I only managed four hours. This being despite that we completed the same amount of work. We end up counting hours instead of looking at how productive those hours are.
Please don’t think that I am criticising the person who is spending the hour on a task. I might if they know better, but if they don’t know better then the time it takes is the time it takes.
If they don’t know better there is always a chance for them to improve their work and eventually also completing a task more efficiently.
Similarly, in a position I am looking at growing into. A query might take someone more senior and knowledgeable than me fifteen minutes from start to end. That same query could take me an hour to write. Is it because I’m bad at it? Or just bad at it for now?
That’s where people tend to look past what is accomplished versus the time taken.
It is always up to the individual to want to improve. If the individual is set in their ways and has no desire to grow and improve, then their timesheet will forever be full of mundane tasks taking forever to complete.
We just need to rid ourselves of this idea that being busy is better. Busy is not always better, more often than not it’s worse. Busy can lead to physical and emotional burnout. We are so busy and so burnt out that we have no energy for things that matter. We are so tied up in the work we are doing that we don’t have the time or energy left for the work or personal projects we want to do.