Busy…meaning of.

October 31, 2007 by gbrown 

window.gifFather’s Day, Japan

Karoshi. A Japanese word for a seemingly Japanese disease – death by overwork. One Father’s Day in Japan, A Karoshi helpline received 181 calls, of which 41 were from families were seeking compensation advice following the death of the husband.

In November 1994, Tsubakmoto Precision Products paid an out-of-court settlement of £340,000 to the family of Karoshi victim Satoru Hiroaka, who died of heart failure aged only 48.

His family said he had worked 71 hours a week and died in 1988 after working for 51 straight days.

The concept of dieing from working too hard may appear extreme to those who don’t consider themselves in the same league as the Japanese salaryman. Yet, while many deaths can be prevented from working sensibly, how many lives could also be saved by people focusing less on the urgent activity and more on what’s important?

“Let me tell you about how (desperately) busy I am”

Jumping on this plane, taking the redeye, working 14 hour days – the moniker of a successful manager, speaking here, presenting there, deadlines to meet, proposals to write, snowed under, stressed out, everything’s manic, busy-busy… It’s how we choose to present our lives:

Busy.

So much in demand, so busy that he/she has little time to get back to people, communicate with friends or get home for their child’s bath-time. Our culture encourages us to indulge in corporate bragging - being “stressed out”, “overworked”, how manic things are as if to signify our value is a direct result of how overstretched and time-poor we are. All that activity tells us and others just how important we are.

Or, is that how important we think other people think we are?

“If you are always busy doing something,you cannot enjoy the world.” Lao Tzu

More activity, more content, more ways of doing the same things better

The noise of low value activity itself obscures the important signals, ie that which creates the value. We live with an addiction to the content of urgent and the unimportant because as long as we continue to remain busy, we will never have to face with the discomfort of sitting still and actually listening to ourselves.

“Western laziness consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues” Sogyal Rinpoche

Eckhart Tolle refers to the incessant need for “more” as our self-satisfying ego’s quest to find some form of completion. If I only could subscribe to that magazine, or that blog feed, or go to that exhibition, attend that seminar, have more contacts, more ways to check email, more technology, more TV, more “life hacks”, I’d have more information in my life.


I might just get that extra piece of information that will make me complete.

15 Minutes Enjoying the Beauty of the Himalayas

Nothing had reconfirmed to me the futile nature of constantly striving for the next thing more than my experiences in Himalayas in 2003. After a pre-dawn rise and a gruelling 6 hour bus journey along winding roads and pothole filled dirt tracks fit only for the most resilient of bullock carts, we arrived at the crest of Tiger Hill north of Bengal at the summit of Ghoom – the meeting point of India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan.

As the sun began to rise, the glory of the distant peaks rising above the morning mist came into full view. To the right I could see the vast hilly expanse of Bhutan, shrouded in low lying clouds. Ahead, the jagged peaks of Kanchenjunga and Jelap-La deep in the Eastern shoulder of the Himalayas and the lost kingdom of Sikkim. To the left the golden peak of Mount Everest.

For a short moment before dawn, the world was still. Silent beneath the glorious stars. Despite the intense cold at an attitude of 3500 metres, I felt a rare connection with my surroundings and for the first time in many years, felt truly alive in the moment.

The experience was short, only 5 minutes…Our guide Ali, a local from the Darjeeling area was poking me in the side, gesturing for our party to return to the bus. We had had our designated 15 minutes enjoying the view, now we had to make tracks to Phuntsholing on the Bhutanese border, a 12 hour journey awaited.

I can also remember spending 12 hours driving in a Jeep across the Japanese Alps to get to an Rotenburo Onsen (outside hot bath) in which we stayed a total of 45 minutes.

These stories we all recognize in some shape or form. These aren’t one-off occurrences but indictments on how we choose to live our lives:

18 hours getting somewhere. 15 minutes enjoying the view.

“This new technology will save me 10 minutes a day”

In the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey refers to the myth of “time management”, that time can in any way be managed efficiently, quoting von Goethe’s statement “Things that matter most should never be at the mercy of things that matter least”.

What will we wish we had spent more time on, when we lie on our deathbeds reflecting upon our lives? More time at the office? More time checking emails? The irony is that those people we worried about impressing with our business, actually couldn’t have cared less. A discovery, no less, made after a life wasted.

The answer will be universal – our relationships with those that matter.

“Thanks for the book, it was great”, my brother said on the phone the week after Christmas “but, it was the same one you had bought me for my birthday”. What an idiot I was! I had been so busy that I rushed a last minute Amazon order online with little thought. Now a gesture that was supposed to represent thoughtfulness appeared rather hollow.

The same applies in business. Value creation derives from relationships and planning, not incessant activity. It was that one meeting that created 80% of your revenues that month, not the 100 daily calls you made. Any good sales person will tell you that once you get beyond the basic transactional level, selling is all about relationships. Jack Welch was quick to dismiss activity as the mark of a corporate leader. “95% of the value a leader creates”, said Welch “is in choosing the right team”. The rest was mere detail.

Back to Father’s Day…

In the “Heart of Success”, Rob Parsons refers to a presentation he made in front of some of the country’s top directors and executives. On asking the room to be silent for 5 minutes, he noticed that within 1 minute, almost half of the audience began fidgeting, uncomfortable with the silence.

It isn’t the sudden dramatic death that’s our biggest crime, it’s the slow almost invisible suffering of lives wasted, internal voices and passions never discovered in the midst of the wall of noise that we call “being busy”.

The Japanese story is a sad yet poignant reminder. There are 936 weekends and 18 birthdays before your child becomes no longer a child. As Parsons points out, no amount of success, money or activity will bring a single one of those back.

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