How Busy Became a Badge

I had a client tell me about a year ago, uh, on a coaching call that he felt guilty watching a movie on a Tuesday night. He had so much to do, he wasn't really sure where this guilt come from, but it was a familiar feeling. Hey everybody, I'm Bill Gallagher, scaling coach and host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. Our show comes to you every week with a story like whatever about this. Also extending this series of solo episodes all about busyness and where busyness is broken and the wrong answer. It's what got you here, but it won't get you there. We're talking about where busy is broken in this series. All right, so that guilt for my client is not personal to him and it's nothing new. And I bet you feel it sometimes too. Maybe you're okay with the movie, but I bet there's something else that is a struggle for you. This guilt that we operate with as business people in North America and in other places as well, but particularly here, is more than 300 years old. It's not his, it's certainly in him, in us. So, in the second chapter of my book, we look at these 5 layers that built this machine that we all swim, that we all operate in. 300 years ago, it was a Puritan work ethic. Benjamin Franklin said time is money. It wasn't a business insight, it was theology of the time. It goes back even further to Calvinist ideas about duty and vocation. Hard work was morally required. It was mandated by a religious tradition of the time. And even if you're not from Puritan stock, as many are not, You're born into this environment that produced it and has been building for 300 years. So 300 years later, nobody says, "I'm working 80 hours to glorify God," but that feeling underneath it is where that comes from. If I'm not producing, I'm not worthy, right? Fast forward, it doesn't just stop there 300 years ago, but then we've got the frontier, 1890s. An American character is forged on the edge of settlement. Survival means hustle. Literally, standing still means dying. That startup founder sleeping under the desk is playing out a frontier kind of a script that is way older than Silicon Valley. If you lived in other places around the world, you maybe know what this is. Now, briefly, growing up, I lived in places like Spain and Switzerland and Israel and Hawaii. And And I can tell you that that work ethic is not universal. In lots of Europe, they take mandatory vacations and, and it's okay to take vacations. They're encouraged to do it. They shut down. They don't check emails when they go off. Other places have— I used to think that part of the mindset that we had so much in Hawaii was because we had things like breadfruit and papaya and coconuts and bananas. And like, you could literally live off the land there. If you want to chill out, you don't have the same, compulsion to hustle. I spent time in Central America, same kind of thing in an equatorial tropical environment. The whole tempo changes, right? In Spain, the culture pauses for lunch. They take a nap in the afternoon when it's beastly hot, and then they go out for very late dinners, right? So the whole work ethic is different in some of these places, right? In Switzerland, colleagues leave at a reasonable hour, and nobody questions their commitment. In Germany, there's like a time to work, and we really work, and we don't BS in that time. We work hard, and then we go home, right? So it's not the same everywhere you go. 1900s, 1911 exactly, really, Taylorism begins scientific management. So the scientific management principles, stopwatches, timed things on the factory floor, But today's knowledge work and other kinds of service work isn't a factory. And your best idea this quarter doesn't come because you, uh, worked every second as fast as you could. Maybe it comes to you in the shower or while you're taking a run or something like that. The best ideas come at surprising times and the rest and recovery is more important than ever. Of course, even in a factory, there's a certain amount of recovery time. We see this happening today in overworked factories in Asia. But think about that now if you're a knowledge worker, a leader of some kind. We can't afford to have you not think clearly at that kind of thing. We can't afford to have you compromised and not being creative. Pencavel did a study that shows output per hour dropped sharply past 50 hours' work. And falls off a cliff past 55. I'm looking at this right now in PhD research around leadership hours and seeing where does our leadership skills break down really precisely. We don't have the exact number yet, but we know that all kind of productivity across a wide range of things falls pretty sharply after 55 hours. There's almost no negligible add. And I bet that leader hours are similar. But that isn't the way we think most of the time, right? Milton Friedman, 1970, uh, gave us this shareholder primacy, the idea of making money being more important than everything else. And a profitable company, um, wasn't growing fast enough, was underperforming. We wanted to do more with less, that kind of thing. This drive and push more, better, competitive kind of thing doesn't— it's all like red ocean kind of same, more effort, not changing the game at all. Fast forward to today, right? You maybe are listening on a mobile device that sits in your pocket most of the day until you set it by your bedside at night, and then it may even wake you from your sleep, or as you wake in your sleep, out of habit, you consult it and you look, your WhatsApp or whatever it is, in the middle of the night to see what's happening in some other part of the world or check in on your business or some aspect of it, right? Used to be able to leave the office and be pretty out of touch, Maybe check for a fax at the front desk of your hotel, that kind of thing. But then came email, and today comes these mobile devices that literally all over the world track us down and ping us and ding us and buzz us at all hours. And, uh, it didn't used to be the case, right? Uh, by 2010, it was assumed that you'd respond to things, right? Technology didn't cause our overwork. All those things were already there. Technology has removed all the safety valves from it, right? Each layer made the next one. So 300 years ago, and then back to the 1800s, and then the early 1900s, 1970, and then to the mobile devices, that whole building thing has reinforced this, like we have to be on and we feel guilty anytime we aren't available or not on. It's nonsense. It's a machine and machines can get redesigned, right? So here's some things to think about. The US is the only advanced economy with no statutory paid vacation, right? There's no like mandate to do that. We don't even know what that is, but it's not true in other parts of the world. Japan even coined a word for death by overwork. Uh, I'll probably pronounce it wrong, but karoshi. Uh, France has enacted the right to disconnect in some places. You have to set your phone to not, uh, connect to people to be able to screen out the company things so they can't intrude on your personal life. Right now, France is not known for being the most competitive companies and economy. Um, but there are things to learn. Certainly Germany has clear boundaries and they're very competitive, um, and very productive in terms of, uh, their, their companies and economies. Right. I cover a lot of interesting leaders in the book. Some, you know, some public figure leaders that I contrast with others, and some you've never heard of before running companies. And some of them are my clients, some tragic stories we anonymize and so on. But the ones that I think are really interesting are the ones who got a wake-up message and then changed their approach. And what I noticed when I looked at a handful of them is that it is possible. It is possible to go from this overworked, overly busy kind of person and completely transform it and become someone who's much more of a a people leader who's building an organization, not just solving the problem of the day, and has a better life, a better relationship, better health, better family, that kind of thing, and a better company all at the same time. It's not about equal time. It's about the right time used in the right way. I say this cult of busyness is a lagging indicator for weak design and weak leadership, weak cultural design, weak organizational design, weak personal boundaries and practices. So I have an invitation for you. For the next couple weeks, notice your guilt. Notice your guilt when you can't sit still, not look at your phone, not do something about your work. Notice the voice in your head that says you should be doing something productive right now. That's this 300-year-old-plus machine, right? The awareness is the first crack at breaking and changing this thing. If you want to— if you're interested in this, just get curious about this guilt, the guilt voice that's going on in your head that doesn't let you just chill out and do nothing, take a walk and look up at the trees and notice and smell the flowers and hold your spouse's hand or sit on the floor with your child or grandchild. Look for that guilt that's there and just notice it. Keep, keep, uh, you don't have to keep a journal of it. You could, uh, but just, you don't have to be productive about noticing your compulsion for productivity. You just be chill about it. Just bring some awareness to it. See if you can keep that alive for the next 2 weeks. Notice what's going on and how pervasive it is or it isn't in your life, right? In the next episode, I'll be talking to you about the numbers. What are the numbers around our productivity? And the impacts on our business. So we'll be looking at the personal costs as well as the business costs of all that. If this conversation about the culture and the history didn't convince you, I think the data will be really surprising when we look at both the personal and the cost to the business. The invoice for being busy is bigger than you think, and I think most of us are refusing to open that invoice. So that's coming up in the next episode. I hope this is helpful for you. I hope you got something out of it. Big shout out and thanks to my production team, Anna and Wanda, for getting our show out every week. If this is curious for you, go to scalingcoach.com or go to busyisbroken.com and get on the advance list for our book there. Thanks again for watching, for listening. Until next time, keep scaling.