Commuters going between increasingly busy work and personal lives. Photo: John Phillips
Last year I wrote about hurry sickness, a perverse addiction compelling many of us to cram as much into our lives as we can.
We frenziedly dash from task to task and event to event, proudly proclaiming to every sympathetic ear just how frantically busy we are.
Being busy, in and of itself, made people happier because idleness, as the researchers suggest, 'is potentially malignant'.
The article was clearly negative. But recent research indicates all this busyness may not be such a bad thing after all.
Children busy at school and with ever-increasing homework. Photo: David Butow
Not in the workplace, anyway. The culmination of five studies, published a few months ago by the Universities of Columbia, Miami, Pittsburgh and Florida, found being busy can actually make you more motivated and productive.
The first study of 201 participants showed busyness made people feel as though they were using their time more effectively. Of course, they may not have been using their time effectively at all but their perception was that they had.
Which is why the second study, this time of 178 people, is so interesting. The participants were asked to think of a time that week they had missed a deadline. Those who described themselves as busy were the ones most likely to say the missed deadline was due to an unexpected cause beyond their control.
"If idle people remain idle, they are miserable." Photo: Pat Scala
Were they just pointing fingers? Perhaps. But the disappointment they felt still motivated them to try harder in a bid to make up for it, which was also replicated in the third study. It was the fourth one, however, that was among the most trustworthy because it moved away from how people perceive themselves and more towards how they react in real-world environments.
Students were told they'd be given cash if they finished a task early. Those who missed the deadline were asked if they were busy at the time they missed it. If they were indeed busy, they were then more likely to complete the task faster than those who were idle. In other words, having more time on your hands, at least in the context of deadlines, makes you less productive.
Precisely how unproductive? Well, the fifth and final study, which comprised half a million tasks by almost 29,000 users, discovered it took busy people an average of 12 days to complete an activity. In contrast, it took non-busy people 19 days.
According to the scholars, this leads to the following conclusions:
· To make yourself more productive, keep at the front of your mind all the tasks you need to complete and break your existing goals into smaller chunks. These acts won't necessarily make you busier per se, but they'll make you "feel" busier, which is apparently just as effective.
· To make your employees more productive, keep them busy. It's "a simple and effective antidote to chronic procrastination and task-completion tardiness." But be mindful that making them too busy could be counterproductive since they just end up feeling overwhelmed.
OK, so being busy seems to be a good thing but does it make us happy? For an answer to that question we need to go back to 2010 and a study led by the University of Chicago. In a series of experiments, the scholars sought to figure out whether people preferred to be busy and whether this brought them joy.
In short: sort-of and yes.
When given a choice, most people preferred to be idle. But ultimately it didn't matter whether they were busy by choice or by force. Being busy, in and of itself, made people happier because idleness, as the researchers suggest, "is potentially malignant. If idle people remain idle, they are miserable."
What do you prefer? To be busy or to be idle?
James Adonis is the author of 'Employee Enragement'
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