Busy work

all along calling it productivity.

Busy work is avoidance in disguise.

Sometimes the reason that you're trying to redesign your website or create another freebie or change your branding or research a new platform isn't because those things need to be done.

It's because the decision you're avoiding feels scarier.

It rewards you for the value of the decisions you make.

You can work 60 hours and barely move the business.

Or you can make one decision that changes a vital piece in your business and the decision can be worth more than months of busy work.

You don't need to work harder.

I'll just say, I'll start with saying our goal is really to help salespeople do more of what they're really good at and what people are really good at and salespeople are really good at, building relationships, building trust, meeting with people, talking with people.

The thing that just takes a ton of time is all the busy work.

People don't like updating a CRM.

People don't like all the data entry.

He would have to face the fact that his company is failing.

So, his brain expanded his busy work to fill his calendar, ensuring he had absolutely no time left for the silence.

This is a version of Parkinson's law in action, work often expands to fill the time we allow it, usually to avoid harder tasks.

The spreadsheet is in progress.

So, where does this leave us? For those of you in your 20s and 30s, grinding to build a career in a hyper-competitive, fast-moving world.

Understand this.

Artificial intelligence is already automating your spreadsheets, your dashboards, and your busy work.

Your survival edge in the future won't be your ability to look busy.

And so I see AI having the ability to do a much better job of segmentation, segmentation of, of how to connect with people, segmentation of how to support people, segmentation of how to understand people.

And so when we start to break down, okay, how do we help each person to be their best selves? How do we help each person to spend more time leveraging their subject matter expertise at the job as opposed to doing busy work? That's really when I think meaningful change occurs, and that's where I think we have a happy medium and a balance between leveraging AI as a tool while still respecting and honoring humans as, or actually at, uh, where, where I think that we should be revolving, you know, and creating a human centric future, not an AI centric future.

That's so interesting, and that path we're on may not really be heading that direction, especially as you're talking about the need to support and connect with other people, that really, that human being aspect of that and the meaning that becomes so core.

So then if we're using, as you say, this human-centered world, not an AI centered world, how should organizations approach AI in a way that would actually enable that?

I think that the best thing to do is to really recognize whether it be at a division, a department, at a person, a team level, what is the one or two f- you know, I'll call maybe up to three things that is the real strengths that they bring, whether it be interpretation, subject matter expertise, something.

And then what you do is you build your systems to say, okay, what are all the things that, that these people are spending their time on that is not into those three categories, right? And then and how do I then use technology to take care of that quote unquote busy work or work or distraction work so that they can spend their time on things like problem solving, generating revenue, innovation, you know, stuff that is that interpretation of the information and data, things that are going to be much easier and, and that I consider much more gifts and abilities, skills that are-- that you would attribute to human intelligence versus artificial intelligence.

And then how would one approach that? Because it does-- that does require the individuality piece coming through and knowing people's strengths and skills, and then in turn building the systems to, you know, maybe automate some of the busy work pieces so people are focused on what's critical.

But how do leaders, managers know what is those critical aspects?

Like, they're able to have these strategic conversations and articulate things that they feel are relevant and important to the company and to their role.

But I feel like where a lot of these things break down is when you talk to an executive and you explain what you're doing and The end point of which they believe, and I think falsely, leads to a lot of just paperwork, for paperwork's sake, busy work.

They see it as a volume of work, which I think is a problem, and they see it as a narrowing of applicability.

Like, we're talking about the whole company.

And as a result, at the end, all I'm going to get is a flow chart.

And how is this going to change things for me? So I think there's a lot of, from what the work dives on, a lot of internal enablement, almost personal enablement to say, like, you are capable of doing this.

What do you say to people who are thinking this is going to be a big amount of just a mound of busy work rather than actual affecting the organization?

Yeah, absolutely.

And, you know, I've found myself doing that before where it feels good.

You feel like you're making progress on something, but if you were to zoom out, you're really just kind of distracting your mind with busy work that doesn't really move any sort of needle anywhere.

So it can feel like you're being productive.

It can feel like you're doing something, but you're not actually contributing to something.

And like, that is something that the more I think senior developers need to watch out for, make sure it's not happening and ask yourself too, like, am I just procrastinating by doing busy work here? And sometimes the answer is yes.

Like we're all humans.

Sometimes I distract myself with, with, with busy work.

But then question for you, Kevin, then is like, when you find yourself distracting yourself with busy work, is there a good reason for that? Like, does your brain need a rest? Or does your brain need to think about this difficult thing that is coming up and it's gearing itself up? Or is it just a waste of time?