We all know what it feels like to be busy. We can feel the weight of our responsibilities and commitments bearing down on us, yet still, we are expected to produce high-performance levels. Busyness is a feeling that often accompanies being effective in our work life. The two are not mutually exclusive, but they are not the same either.
Busyness can indicate that you’re doing too much or not enough at any given time. In contrast, effectiveness is about meeting expectations and standards with your tasks without working yourself into exhaustion or being overwhelmed by stress from overenthusiastic expectations.
The difference between the two is that effectiveness, while not always simple to attain in a high-stress work environment, can be achieved by working smarter with your time and energy rather than simply harder. In addition, efficiency will help you stay on task when there are many competing priorities at once, which should free up some of your time.
It is common knowledge that this generation is busier than any other generation that ever came before. Many people suffer from what is commonly known as “activity addiction.” Often, we fall into this trap when our lives are cluttered with activities, meetings, events, and tasks that demand time. We have to remember that busyness is not a virtue. If you’re not careful, you will quickly fall into the trap of being busy but not effective.
Tips to Improve Your Effectiveness
- Refocus your priorities for greater effectiveness: Identify what is important to you in life and then figure out where you are getting in the way of that. It’s very easy to get caught up in things we think we have to do rather than what gives us joy! So instead, take some time to reflect on how you spend your days. Ask yourself if each of those activities truly makes you happier and more effective at living the life you want, or if they bring fleeting moments of pleasure but ultimately don’t align with what you want to achieve.
- Choose something that will help move you forward on your journey towards self-improvement, whether it’s spending time with your kids, studying a new language or instrument, volunteering, or doing something else entirely.
- Rethink your morning routine: We may be busy during the day, but our mornings have tremendous power to set our trajectories for that entire day. How do you want to feel, and what do you want to accomplish during the hours of your day? When you start with a clear vision and a solid plan of action for getting there, it’s incredible what can happen. And yet, many people jump out of bed and don’t give their days any direction at all.
- Farther, faster, and better: We tend to associate busyness with being important. The more meetings you attend, the more emails you answer, and the longer your work hours are, you are surely a highly productive person who is earning their keep. Right? It’s not even close. At the end of each day, what matters is not how many hours we’ve worked but rather what we’ve accomplished while we were working.
It’s often said that 80% of your success is due to 20% of your activities. This rule has been dubbed “the Pareto Principle” or the “80-20 rule.” The way this principle works is that you start by identifying what areas yield the most fruit and focus on those first. Once you’ve mastered those priority activities, you can move onto the next set of tasks that will usually be less time-consuming but still beneficial.