Your 2 busy meter

# Chapter 193

As I said yesterday, busy people are that by choice as a general rule, 99 % of the time. Nor does busy equal productive. Not even close. As I confessed I was on track to be the busiest person in the world, but was I productive? Sometimes. More often I was simply busy, or just busy appearing to be busy. Being busy is hard work, but it is not productive necessarily. Honestly, since I have given up being busy, I work far fewer hours and I produce far more qualitative pieces of work.

Busy and productive are often seen as a matched pair, but I would argue the opposite, unless by productive you actually mean busy. But in the circles of leadership and development that I work with around the world, productive is better defined as the value you bring to a project or task or client or the world. Productive is vastly different from busy when you think of it in terms of outcomes or value provided rather than how you are the linchpin to the success of the organization or an event or how many tasks you are juggling in a certain time frame. Unfortunately everyone around you may over-value the linch-pin busy person above the person who produces the value or the best outcomes.

What value are you creating for this situation or these people or this client? This is the question that you should be answering. Not questions like, how much you have to do (quantity)? Or how important are you in the food chain of this business or organization? For a productive non-busy person, “what value am I providing” is generally the best question to ask and answer.