How to eliminate Crazy Busyness

“It doesn’t matter how good my clients are – if they focus their attention on the wrong things, they won’t be as successful as they could be”, says Zena Everett, Vistage Speaker and owner of a global leadership coaching and speaking practice. 

In her upcoming Vistage Climb webinar in April, Zena’s focus will not be on productivity. Instead, it will be on helping business leaders decide where they can spend their time more wisely, and lead that decision-making within their organisations. 

“For example, when they spend 20 minutes on LinkedIn, that could be 20 minutes spent having a valuable feedback conversation with their team”, she explains. “I’m helping people free up more time to spend it more valuably, steering away from Crazy Busyness: confusing being efficient with being effective.”

The perils of productivity drag

Huge numbers of leaders – and their teams – feel constantly tired, overworked and distracted. This, says Zena, is down to productivity drag: things like regular digital interruptions, lengthy decision-making processes, inefficient meetings and other low-value tasks. “Eliminating this Crazy Busyness”, says Zena, “is the vital bridge between strategy and execution.” 

“It’s confusing being busy with making progress”, she explains. “Many of the organisations I work with have automated quite a lot: they’re getting ahead of the game…but people still don’t have any more time. 

This is where the concept of flow comes in. 

Greater flow = greater success

“Flow is deep thinking”, continues Zena. “It’s problem-solving. It’s uninterrupted time to really think and do something well – and it’s hard to do that in a state of constant distraction.”

Constantly switching from one task to another interrupts an individual’s flow state. “It takes a little time to get back into something once you’ve been distracted by something else”, says Zena. “Add up that little bit of time, that 15-20 minutes, over the course of a day, a week, a month, and you’ll see that you’re using up a lot of precious resource.”

Flow is the opposite. It involves concentrating on a single thing at a time: becoming fully absorbed in it, and doing it well. 

“It essentially means getting your head down, blocking off notifications and doing an hour’s work without interruption”, she explains. “There’s so much data about how people can be far more productive, even if they do this for just a couple of hours per day. But when I ask people when they were last in flow, the answer is invariably ‘that’s an early morning or weekend activity’ – they say that it is very hard to get working flow during the day.”

A study by McKinsey reveals that working together in a state of flow for a couple of hours a day can make a team five times more productive. “It’s not just productivity that improves either”, says Zena. “People also report being happier, more successful, earning more money or working fewer hours as a result.”

Why you should attend Zena’s Vistage Climb Webinar

“How much difference would it make to your business if people were able to get their work done better, quicker and more efficiently?” asks Zena. 

Zena’s Vistage webinar will help business leaders to uncover “the stone in their shoe”: the things that make things complicated and slow things down. “We’ll also look at how they lead the workflows as well as the workers, and ways they can make it easier for people to do really great work”, says Zena. “Business leaders lead time, focus and energy in the workplace – and also lead what gets in the way of getting things done. This webinar will help them free up time to coach, to give feedback, and to be truly strategic.”

Sign up for Zena’s Vistage webinar here.

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