Busy vs. Productive Continued

“Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing." Thomas Edison

In the years I have spent managing people it never ceased to amaze me the number of people who were keeping themselves busy at work and could never understand why their peers were surpassing them. I heard all sorts of complaints such as “I have been here longer than him”, “I work much harder than her” or “she is just lucky”. Many years ago I stopped wasting my breath trying to explain to these people that just because they were busy did not mean they were helping the company in any way shape or form.

Throughout my life I have often been called lucky or very successful for my age. This was because at a very young age I picked up on the idea that it wasn’t the people in the world that worked the hardest who were at the top, it was those who worked the smartest. If it were the hardest workers at the top of the financial food chain we would see countless millionaires from the manual labour pools. The truth of the matter though is that very few people who do labour for a lifetime will ever be near the top. They are usually the ones putting in 12 hour work days and living pay cheque to pay cheque. It is a sad but true reality of this crazy world we live in.

CB