“I am so tied up that I cannot find time even for my family; my day does not end before mid night, I travel 20 days a month” – sounds familiar? So many people whine like that. It is almost impossible to meet anybody who claims to have all the time in the world. But the truth is; people love to be busy. Without flaunting a busy schedule, they think their value in society diminishes. 

 

People complain about being overloaded. But given a chance – none will drop any of their current work. Instead, they will tell why continuing those jobs are essential. In the name of corporate governance, we build up layers of work and control checks but never ask whether they are really adding value or not? Despite making immense 

sense, we find it difficult to stop non productive work.

 

In relatively older organization, everyone agrees of it having tons of fats, but always on other departments. Agreeing otherwise is suicide - right? When a cross functional team brainstorms to redefine responsibility, people end up pointing out activities others should drop instead of opportunities in their own domain. They spend hours justifying criticality of each of their activity and why it should continue, instead of justifying how it helps in achieving organizational goal. 

 

Why stopping activities are so hard? There are several psychological reasons. Being busy is a status symbol which gives people a sense of power and importance. People crave to be associated with projects, chambers and committees. While they complain about lack of time and insist that they were sucked into it, in reality, being there is a matter of prestige and power. 

 

We do not want to stop things lest it will take as an admittance of the futility of our work. In difficult times like recession, amidst threats of retrenchment and cost reduction, people desperately defend their work albeit at the cost of sounding dumb. It comes from a deep insecurity. While one finds it easy to identify unnecessary activities others are doing, he will never admit his own work is not adding value. After all, what would he do then?

 

Non-value-added tasks and de-prioritized projects or processes continue because people get emotionally attached to them and just don’t want to let go. Once they invest time and effort in starting something, a sense of ownership prevents them from stopping it even though they were aware about the futility. 

 

But time is costly and non-value-added activity is a wastage which hits the bottom line indirectly. So a remedy is essential for the organization. 

 

Management must introspect: is organization becoming too complex? Is current structure adding to costs and slowing down decisions? If yes, then they must restructure and shed the fat. This is a major project taken up after any leveraged buy out. New management analyses every part of organization and removes fats ruthlessly to make it lean, cost effective and efficient. This enhances shareholder value. Organization does not take this up during normal time because it is not a priority when things are going smoothly. After all, one starts working out only after first heart attack. 

 

Given these powerful dynamics, certain things can be done to ensure responsibilities are restructured and redefined for betterment before it is 

too late:

 

Psychological factors have to be dealt with. Changes are resisted due to fear of uncertainty. Addressing that will ensure changes are championed. One should learn not to over commit. Realistic commitment and task prioritization ensure smooth, timely delivery. Exchanging non productive with productive work will also enhance our employability. 

 

Sunset clause and success matrix at the beginning of any initiative is important. If people know beforehand that their project will shut down if certain success criterions are not met, closure will be easy. Shut down becomes natural when the end is envisioned at the beginning. Then we can plan better and even pull the plug early 

to save cost.

 

In any job profile, activities should be categorized. For each activity we should prepare an alternate scenario. What happens if that activity is stopped? – Worst case! What else to do in that time which will add better value? – Alternative with a conservative estimation. The trade-off decides whether to continue or drop that activity. Some works are needed to be done in the organization; some are critical to the employee; but everything is not critical and needed. A Johari Window can be created for each job. Then decision becomes logical and pragmatic.

 

 

Spending quality time in quality work is always important. I remember some words of Henry David Thoreau - “It is not enough to be busy... The question is: what are we busy about?”