“Understand the difference between being at work and working.” — Unknown person
I saw that quote the other day and it reminded me of a really awkward comment that an executive tweeted a few months ago. In 140 characters (I’m paraphrasing here) the tweet said something about how they looked at their employee’s calendar and saw that they didn’t have any meetings scheduled that whole day, and they questioned if that person was actually working. The comment seemed totally ridiculous to me. You don’t need to be on back to back conference calls to get your job done, especially if you’re in the trenches doing the actual work.
The situation sort of begs the question – do you know the difference between being at work and actually working?
What you do throughout the day really varies based on level, industry and role. The executive mentioned before spends a lot more time in meetings and a lot less time doing the day-to-day tactical activities that keep the programs moving. Lengthy email chains and over scheduled meetings doesn’t always constitute as work. It’s been proven that unproductive meetings are costing companies an estimated $37 million dollars a year.
I’m not going to argue what does and doesn’t constitute as work, because each job is so vastly different than the next. But I do think that there’s a least one point throughout the day or week where we’re pulled into a situation disguised as work, but it really isn’t the biggest priority we need to be focused on, and it takes us a while to bounce back and tackle the more important deliverables.
Sitting back down and getting focused isn’t easy. To help with the struggle, we’ve put together a list of five tips to help you be less busy and more productive.
There are a lot of shades of grey between work and working. Hopefully these tips will help you differentiate between the tasks we get caught up in and the ones that we need to accomplish.
Photo credit: Someecards
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