Busy Has a Very Good Publicist

Busy has somehow become the most impressive word in leadership.

"I've been absolutely manic."

"Sorry, I've just got so much on."

"I'd love to think about that properly but I'm flat out at the moment."

We say it as though being busy is evidence that we're important, effective and in demand. Sometimes it is. Often it's simply evidence that we haven't had five quiet minutes to work out what actually needs our attention.

One of the things I notice with leaders is that they can spend an entire day being highly productive without making much progress on the things that really matter. There are emails to answer, meetings to attend, decisions to make and a never-ending stream of small fires that all arrive wearing a rather convincing hat labelled "URGENT".

The problem is that good thinking rarely happens in the gaps between those things.

It needs space.

It needs time to wander a little, to challenge an assumption, to notice that the problem you've been trying to solve isn't actually the problem at all. It needs enough breathing room for your brain to move beyond reacting and start making sense of what is really going on.

Yet thinking time is often the first thing to disappear when pressure increases.

We protect the meetings.

We protect the deadlines.

We protect the operational work.

Thinking?

We'll squeeze that in somewhere.

Except that somewhere rarely appears.

The leaders I work with often don't need another tool, another framework or another piece of advice. They need an hour where nobody is asking them for an answer, where they don't have to perform certainty and where they can slow down enough to hear themselves think.

That doesn't make them less productive.

It usually makes everything that follows far more deliberate.

So perhaps the question isn't "How do I fit more into my day?"

Perhaps it's "What would I think differently about if I wasn't quite so busy?"

Because sometimes the most productive thing a leader can do is stop doing long enough to think.

And yes, I appreciate the irony of suggesting that to someone who is probably reading this between two meetings.

#Leadership #LeadershipDevelopment #ExecutiveCoaching #ThinkingSpace #Productivity #PeopleLeadership