The Tyranny of the Urgent

Have you ever imagined a fly sitting on top of your desk watching you during a typical day? It would see you arrive at the office in the early morning, rush from meeting to meeting while urgently firing out e-mails and phone calls. It would buzz around your “working lunch” at the conference table, and be left in the dark after you turn out the lights in the evening.

If the fly could ask about your day, you’d tell him that you had extinguished fire after fire and felt like you were barely able to keep your head above water. “There’s simply not enough time,” you’d tell him, while pushing feelings of tiredness, anxiousness, and depression away. You’d tell him that even on the weekends, when you’re supposed to be spending quality time with your family, work is constantly on your mind. Your cell phone keeps ringing and e-mails fill up your inbox.

I have to confess that this isn’t exactly a product of my imagination. In fact, it’s an accurate description of most of my days. But an advantage of having to write this column once a month is that it forces me to reflect. Lately, I’ve realized that everyone is in such a rush that we don’t have time to do things right (with the irony being that we’re forced to find time to do them over).

We are reactive, constantly putting out fires rather than proactively executing strategy. Instead of careful planning for the future of our businesses, we get mired down in the details. And when we get overloaded, tired, anxious, and depressed, it’s not even socially acceptable to take time to heal. We have given up our time to recover and regroup and instead press ahead in the name of progress.

Is This Progress?

Because this feeling of overload has been nagging me, I recently read Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives by Dr. Richard A. Swenson. I particularly liked a story he tells about his Grandpa, an immigrant from Sweden. His grandpa had a tough pioneer life. He struggled with health problems, the death of two infants, and trying to provide food and shelter for his family. My own family has a similar story.

By contrast, most U.S. citizens today have access to health care and education, a warm home in the winter, and a reliable supply of safe and healthy food. In fact, we have an abundance of the things that the pioneers only dreamed of having.

We still work as hard as the pioneer generation, but at different types of jobs—all in the name of getting ahead and making progress. We have the leisure activities, conveniences, and comforts that the pioneers never would have imagined. Yet we’re still not happy, and our society suffers from unacceptably high levels of divorce, depression, teen pregnancy, crime, drugs, alcoholism, childhood obesity, and stress-related diseases. Would Grandpa call this progress? I don’t think so.

Distracted Managers

I could go on and on about the effects of overloaded lives on society in general, but for the purposes of this column, I’m focusing my comments on the overloaded, rushed, harried lives of business leaders.

According to research conducted by Heike Bruch, a professor of leadership at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, and Sumantra Ghoshal, a professor of strategy and international management at the London Business School, only about 10 percent of managers use their time as effectively as they could. In “Beware the Busy Manager,” their February 2002 Harvard Business Review article, Bruch and Ghoshal wrote that the least effective managers are the ones who look like they are doing the most. These busy managers (and that’s most of us, according to their research) think they’re doing something important, but are really just spinning their wheels.