The Busy Brag

Domain: Personal Effectiveness - Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

A colleague, friend or family asks how things are going, specifically within the context of one's job. The default response for many professionals is to emphasize how incredibly busy they are. It has become so common that that responses such as "Busy" or "Just keeping my head above water" have become cliché and have started to lose meaning.

This type of response is motivated by the fallacy that businesses is an indication of importance, effectiveness or even overall value. While you may be both busy and effective, it's important to remember that correlation does not equal causation.

The truth is, all of us are busy to some extent. You are not unique in that regard. Focusing on this fact is at best annoying to some of your co-workers and potentially indicates deeper opportunities with how you manage your time, priorities and work-life balance.

Here are just a few tips on responding to this innocuous question that are both interesting and better highlight your value…

Reflect first

Most professionals are busy. Unfortunately, many stay busy working on low-value, non-priority items. Sharing that you spent the weekend catching-up on emails instead of spending time with your family absolutely sends a message…maybe just not the one you intended.

Since we're all busy, the first step is to ask ourselves…are we busy on the right things? Are you leveraging your unique skills and talents to contribute in ways that few can? If so, that's great! If not, start taking steps towards that goal. This will look different for everyone, but our guidance on delegation may be a good starting point.

Get specific

Instead of simply declaring how busy you are, share insight on a specific project or effort that you're working on that you are passionate about or find joy in. This is going to be more exciting for you to talk about and much more interesting for the other person.

Brevity is the soul of wit

Specificity is more interesting, but it's also important to still keep things brief. The person asking about your job likely wasn't looking for 30 minute presentation. Keep things high-level and if they ask questions you can intuitively start sharing more details.

Thank you for reading. My hope is always that you've found something helpful and easy to implement.

This week’s action items:

1. Reflect on whether you are busy with the right things.

2. Consider our delegation content if there are things you need to let go of. Search "delegation" here.

3. Identify the projects you are excited about in order to share more about them when asked.

4. Keep the summary of these exciting projects short and then elaborate when asked.