Busyness is Not a Virtue

If you're working at a big company you're almost required to be busy. In fact you're looked down upon if you're not busy enough. How many times have you ran into co-workers only to do a little smalltalk? You talk about the projects you're working on and how slammed you are with work.

Being busy at the workplace is a way to seem important. You might run into someone at the cafe and say hey we should catch up. Well, why wouldn't you just catch up right then and there? That would be the most efficient route. You're both already together in the same place at the same time. Do you really need to rush back to your desk to do some more busy work?

This is a fine article if you already believe that busyness is bad. The trouble is that busy people are, by definition, people who think being busy is a feature not a bug.

For example, we can spin the wheel and play bug-or-feature:

> And when you start sounding like an appliance, it makes it hard to connect with you.

Bug or feature? Depends on your personality, depends on who's connecting with you.

> This is one of the easiest outs for stuff I don’t want to do.

Bug or feature?

Another sentiment I see in TFA and the comments is that saying "I'm busy" is a euphemism for "I don't care about you" so people shouldn't say it. But this analysis assumes that the heaviest rock is for a person not to be rude. I suspect that in many cases that if you remove the method for a polite brush-off, you could get an impolite brush-off instead. Nothing has been done to address the underlying motivation behind saying "I'm busy".

If you find yourself in the author's shoes being frustrated by how other people are too busy for you, I might recommend reading some sales books and figuring out how to make proposals that are more agreeable to others. Writing a blog post about how other people need to change will not help you solve that problem.

I find that it can be really difficult to measure productivity some times, especially when long hours are involved. If I work 2x hours and I get stuff done all throughout that time (beginning, middle, and end) then I'll tend to think all of those hours were well spent. But when I spend the time and effort to really look at productivity I find that typically spending more hours only produces the illusion of greater productivity. Often times I'll easily forget the downsides of working more hours, such as poorer quality of work, less focus and ability to concentrate, more down time between periods of work, greater likelihood of being OK with partial or inferior solutions, etc.

Over time I've come to the conclusion that except for "it's broken, and time is money" or "I've found inspiration at midnight" situations it's pretty much never a good idea to consistently work long hours on software projects. It's better to work smarter and more efficiently and to have the resources available to do big refactoring / redesign / performance improvement projects when necessary than to just work flat out and always be in an "ok, that's good enough, moving on" state of mind.