The Difference Between Being Busy vs Being Effective

If being productive was as simple as making a big, huge to do list, we would all be smashing it at work and no one would be feeling overwhelmed. I would also not have any clients. 🙃

Because you're probably already very good at making to do lists. You're probably even good at colour coding your calendar or squeezing things into the slots between meetings.

But the problem is that your working day doesn't usually go according to the plan you made at 8 or 9am.

You sit down thinking you've got a plan, and then by 4pm you're thinking, I didn't do one thing on my list today.

Instead, you've been to 17 meetings, answered 14 impromptu phone calls, said yes to a meeting you didn't have time for, skipped your lunch break and dealt with approximately 47 things that weren't on your list when you sat down that morning.

You've been busy all day.

But were you actually effective?

I think this is where we get ourselves into trouble. We look at how much we've done and use that as evidence that we've had a productive day, when actually a lot of what we've done has just been responding to whatever was put in front of us.

And I'm not saying those things aren't important. Sometimes they absolutely are. That's work. Things happen, people need things, priorities change and your perfectly planned day is going to get interrupted.

The problem is when everything gets the same amount of your attention.

The email gets answered immediately. The meeting gets accepted. The quick question turns into 20 minutes. The thing you actually needed to finish gets pushed to tomorrow because there wasn't any space left for it.

And then tomorrow comes and you do the same thing again.

This is why I think being effective at work is a very different skill from simply being busy.

Being effective means knowing what actually needs to happen, making space for it and then following through, while still leaving enough room for the incidental stuff that comes with having a real job.

It might mean deciding that the report needs two uninterrupted hours in your calendar rather than hoping you'll magically get it done between meetings. It might mean batching all those little tasks instead of letting them interrupt you all day. It might mean looking at the five things on your list and deciding that actually, only two of them need to happen today.

And sometimes it means looking at your calendar and realising that there simply isn't enough capacity, rather than trying to squeeze another three hours of work into a day that is already full.

That's the bit I really want women to understand.

You don't need to be doing more. You need to be doing more of the right things.

Because when you stop measuring your productivity by how busy you've been and start measuring it by whether you've moved the things that matter forward, your whole working day can start to look different.

You might still have a busy calendar. You might still have interruptions. You might still have days where everything goes completely sideways.

But you know what you actually needed to achieve, you've made space for it, and you get to the end of the day knowing that the important stuff got done.

And that's a very different feeling from getting to 4pm, looking at your list and thinking, I've been working all day and I haven't done anything.

That's the difference between being busy and being effective.

And if you want to see where this is happening in your own working week, book a Coffee Chat with me. I'll look at your actual calendar and show you the top three things I'd change right away.