I often worry about how busy everyone in Corporate America seems to be. I bumped into a colleague at lunch and he was busy reading a presentation while also glancing at the WSJ at the same time. As he got up, he took out his blackberry frantically reading all the unread messages. We both agreed to catch up but his calendar was completely booked for two weeks!
The guy is busy!
Does he has some time to just sit back and think? Think about what he needs to do, think about the critical few things, think about where he is taking his career etc etc. I wonder...
The more and more I have met people, I have begun to realize that there are two things happening. One- a busy calendar is a sign of importance, so "busy"ness is a reinforcement of one's self esteem. Two- we dont prioritize well at all. Things just get on our calendar and we do them. Half the meetings are meetings we dont need to be at and so if we got really intentional about things, we wouldnt be that busy at all. I remember reading once that this generation is caught up in the thick of thin things. Thick of thin things...that really resonated with me. We just need to keep things in perspective and the real test of all this is when one goes on vacation. If nothing major drops when one is out (and seldom is that the case), clearly we have an overblown sense of our own importance than needs to be the case.
What does it mean? Enjoy the meeting, keep some "free" time to go with the flow, to allow for flexibility for what is life without a little bit of a surprise. While being busy is good, if you're too busy, you are living by a calendar and thats no fun...I know Sumantra Ghoshal wrote an article in HBR a few years back titled- Beware the Busy Manager, wherein he found that a lot of managers really dont focus their time well and they could be so much more effective if they just stepped back to take an objective look at how they spend their time. We could all do very well with that advice.
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