Looking Busy, While Slacking
April 3, 2025
Another dinobaby blog post. Eight decades and still thrilled when I point out foibles.
I am fascinated by people who delegate routine, courteous business functions to software and then to other people. The idea is that a busy person can accomplish much more if they are really busy but organized. I find this laughable.
In my experience, the people with full-time jobs with whom I interact are in a perpetual rush to go from one mostly pointless activity to their mobile phone and back again. Here’s an approach that has worked for some successful people. I exclude myself because I am an 80-year-old dinobaby loser.
The secret sauce consists of:
- Knowing what is important by day, week, month, and year. Do what’s important yourself. If you delegate, delegate with intelligence of the goal and expected outcome.
- Set priorities but have sufficient situational intelligence to adapt to the endlessly changing business environment. (Software just does stuff; it is not — despite the AI hype — inherently intelligent. And, no, I don’t want to discuss this perception of mine. I do not believe in made up baloney from marketing people or pressured CEOs.
- Recognize that how you interact with other people defines [a] your intelligence, [b] your management and social capabilities, and [c] your professional persona.
I had an email exchange a couple of days ago from a person who told me an individual would contact me. The statement was made two weeks ago. The message was, “Oh, just use our online appointment system and set up an available time.” No kidding. I am now supposed to move from “we will contact you” to navigate to our system and pick an available time. Sorry. That will not happen.
A day ago, a person who said 11 months ago, “I will call you early next week.” I received an email as it was indeed a week later, not 11 months later. Amazing. Both are considerably younger than I am, but neither person is aware of their behavior. This weird approach to business is the norm.
I read “Slack: The Art of Being Busy Without Getting Anything Done” resonated with me. I have an idea: Send the link to the article to these two people who say, “Let’s have lunch” and never call. (That’s a Manhattan trope, by the way. It means, “Hey, you, I will never call you for lunch.” Business life has become a “let’s have lunch” world. Saying something is tantamount to actually doing something.
The write up puts this in terms of a weird information sharing service which is a closed group social media thing. The write up says:
Slack brought channels and channels bought a level of almost voyeurism into what other teams were doing. I knew exactly what everyone was doing all the time, down to I knew where the marketing team liked to go for lunch. Responsiveness became the new corporate religion and I was a true believer.
To me, I think the organizations that function so that a tool like Slack is necessary have some management issues. But that’s the bias of a person who worked at a blue-chip consulting firm for longer than I thought humanly possible.
Here’s a passage I found interesting for a person paid to deliver outputs and meet objectives:
My days had become a never-ending performance of “work”. I was constantly talking about the work, planning the work, discussing the requirements of the work, and then in a truly Sisyphean twist, linking new people to old conversations where we had already discussed the work to get them up to speed on our conversation. All the while diligently monitoring my channels, a digital sentry ensuring no question went unanswered, no emoji not +1’d. That was it, that was the entire job.
What are the markers for this process of doing something that yields no deliverable that matches a job description or a task assigned by a manager to a worker?
Let me highlight a few I have noticed:
- Talking about doing replaces doing itself
- Meetings and follow ups are the work. It goes without saying that delivering an output that generates revenue is not part of the actual activity of the meeting and its follow up
- The mental effort required to do essentially meaningless tasks instead of satisfying deliverables of high quality burns a person out. “There is no there there.” I am not talking about Oakland, California. I am talking about the actual value to the person of doing meaningful work and getting money and mental rewards.
- The organization delivers increasingly degrading outputs. One wordsmith invoked feces to describe how the entity deconstructs. Microsoft shipped an update that killed its AI wunderkind Copilot. More information about new malware hit my in box today. The Epic data form for a routine visit lost the inputs I provided six months ago. My local bank charged my home checking account for over $600,000 and was unable to stop the automated fraud for two weeks.
Net net: Manage effectively and do actual work to deliver the outputs for which you are paid. Understand that both are hard. That’s why people pay you to do work. The craziness of pretending to work will make the worker crazy. If that type of person interacts with me, I just forget it. Dinobabies can do that.
Stephen E Arnold, April 3, 2025
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