The Biggest Secret in the 9-to-5 World Everyone Knows, and No One Talks About

If you have ever worked a desk job, or currently do, you know there is one word that gets thrown around the office between people more often than any other, and that word is…

Busy.

Everyone always says they are busy. All the time. Constantly busy. Doesn’t matter the time of day, or what they are actually doing. The answer to ‘how’s it going?’ is more often met with a deep sigh, a raising of the eyebrows, a shaking of the head, and a half-mustered spoken word: busy.

But the truth of the matter is, busy has become a cover word. It’s the word you use to let others know your position at work is justified. That you are being a good employee and staying busy.

Herein lies the problem. Busy becomes justification for everything. Staying busy is done to pass the time. Staying busy is going from meeting to meeting and watching the day cruise by. Busy is making sure you give the perception to your coworkers that you are not a slacker. Busy is the word you use when you actually aren’t doing anything, but don’t want your coworkers to know that you’ve sat around surfing the internet for the last 3 hours.

The truth is so much of being busy is not important. It’s self-induced. It’s the feeling that if I present that I am not busy or working all the time, I won’t get promoted. I won’t get a raise. I won’t hit the level my boss wants. It’s the secret that everyone hides: if my boss knew just how little actual time I spend being productive and doing work on a day-to-day basis, I may get fired. It’s the secret everyone knows, but no one talks about.

It reminds me of this scene from Office Space. When I watched this movie growing up, it was hilarious. I couldn’t imagine a world like that could actually exist. Then I got older, and saw that for far too many people, Office Space turned from a fictional comedy to a realistic documentary about their daily work life. And that’s terribly depressing.

We’ve turned to our favorite word busy to divert attention from this fact. To try and show our value. But are you actually being productive? I hate to bring up the old cliché, but it’s true: being busy and being productive are two entirely different things.

But we’ve unknowingly created a world where busy trumps all in the 9-to-5 world. Why? Because we don’t actually need to work all 8 hours in a day anymore. Work flow is up and down. Some weeks are full of things to do, others are dead. Some mornings are busy, and sometimes there is nothing to do in the afternoon. Yet we feel we need to justify a constant flow, a constant busy. It probably stems back to our production line job days as a country, when your 8 hour shift meant you were actually working all 8 hours in the mine or factory or on the production line.

We don’t have production lines anymore. We have desks and computers and emails and phone calls. Yet we hold the same mindset as before that a good employee puts in 8 solid hours. This just isn’t reality anymore. Don’t believe me? Tomorrow when you are at work, use your timer on your phone, and start it every time you are doing actual productive work. Stop it when you aren’t. Repeat until the end of the day. See how much time you actually accrue. You’ll probably be shocked at how low it is.

What we as a society need to get away from is the constant focus on time input in our jobs. Jobs descriptions read tasks needed to be accomplished, but so much of how an employee is judged is based on perception, and particularly, working the hours you’re supposed to. The boss who says ‘listen, you are doing great work and accomplishing everything you need to, but you left 30 minutes early yesterday, so I am going to have to mark you down’. So no wonder employees then spend their time on figuring out ways to look busy, rather than being productive, because they somehow have to fill those 8 hours. It’s the old shuffling papers routine: if I sit at my desk and shuffle papers for a while, it’ll sound like I’m busy, and I’ll look like a good employee.

Let’s learn to value the outputs of our work more than the time input. Let’s learn to commend someone on the work they do, not the time it took them to do it. Let’s create work cultures where busy isn’t a word people use as a crutch to justify themselves. Let’s turn Office Space from a reality so many live in back to a comedy. Because when employees don’t have to worry about giving everyone the perception they are busy, you’ll actually find they become more productive.