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time management

Are You Guilty?

How can you recognize if you are involved in work that has little
effect on achieving your or your organization’s goals? What if your
supervisor has assigned you a task or project that you believe to be
of little value? Is it still busywork if it’s a requirement?

Let’s say that the project your manager assigned to you is busy-
work in your view. Before you create a scene complete with righ-
teous indignation, let’s step back for a minute and look at the situation
objectively. You may be in a position to determine the project’s value,
or you may not have all the facts necessary to judge the big picture.
The results of this assignment may be on the critical path of someone
in the organization unknown to you. So it may seem like busywork,
and you can waste a great deal of energy and time fighting it, but the
fact of the matter is that it needs to be completed. Make sure you
understand what’s required (and what’s not), only spend as much time
on it as necessary, and move on to something else.

In general, busywork, and the negative consequence of busy-
work, implies a choice. We are guilty of performing busywork if
we have chosen to avoid more important, goal-related, and poten-
tially difficult assignments by burning up time on tasks that won’t
matter when they’re completed. Or, if we put more effort into a
task than it requires. It’s possible to spend a lot of time perfect-
ing the appearance of a report—selecting fonts, laying out pages
artistically, using graphics—but if this report is an internal docu-
ment and the readers will be concerned only with its content, then
the effort of page beautification is pointless busywork. You have
chosen to spend your time on qualities that have no consequence
or relevance to the task.

The definition of busywork, then, involves value, and value is
a judgment. It’s important who is making the judgment. We have
seen that a supervisor’s judgment can trump that of her employ-
ees when it comes to determining a task’s value, and the rational
employee accepts that fact. In a lot of cases, though, you get to
judge a task’s value, determine how much effort to put into it, and

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