"I'm so busy" has become the automatic answer to "how are you doing?" But busy doing what? Ben and Syya dig into the difference between looking productive and actually moving the needle, from inside sales reps dialing the weather just to hit call quotas, to the CRM data-entry spiral that eats hours and closes zero deals.

They talk about why the metrics you choose determine the behavior you get, why copying "what Google does" isn't a strategy, and why busy work is often really a sign of weak systems and unclear priorities, not a personal failing. If your team (or you) feels constantly in motion but never ahead, this one's for you.

Takeaways:

• The podcast emphasizes that individuals are the crucial X factor in both business and life.
• A prevalent theme discussed is the detrimental effects of incessant busyness on productivity and strategic thinking.
• We explore the cultural implications of busyness and the societal pressure to appear productive at all times.
• The conversation highlights the importance of creating systems and processes to mitigate busy work and maximize efficiency.

Links referenced in this episode:

• benbaker.com
• brilliantbeanmedia.com

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Google
• IBM
• McKinsey

Learn more about Ben Baker at IamBenBaker.com | Chat it up with Syya and the team at BrilliantBeamMedia.com | 📺 Produced by BBM

If there's one thing we've learned about business and life is that people are the X factor.

They constantly surprise us, both in amazing ways and not so much.

We're Ben and Sia, and welcome to the Gnaw this Business Bites podcast.

This show is all about real life, things we all deal with every day, how they relate to business, and how to make some sense out of our daily chaos.

Welcome to the show.

Foreign.

Welcome back to another episode of Non this Business Bites.

I'm Ben and this is Sia.

And this week I want to talk about breaking the business busyness trap.

We all.

Every single day, I talk to people and say, how you doing?

And the first words out of people's mouth is, I'm so busy, I'm so busy, I can't even, you know, I'm just so busy, I can't even tell you how busy I am because I don't have enough time to tell you how busy I am.

My first question is, busy doing what?

What are we so busy with?

How is how we have.

We enabled our lives to become this.

This trap of moving from one task to another to another to another to another without building the systems, processes, and time in there to breathe, to process, to think, to act and react.

Because when we go from task to task to task, when we don't make the time to reflect, when we don't take the time to actually understand what we're trying to do and actually contemplate and be strategic about it, that's when the big mistakes happen.

So, Sia, let's dawn this.

Ah, so, you know, when you have a certain kind of brain chemistry, that busyness thing does feel productive at times.

Right?

And I think there is a cultural aspect to this as well.

I think Americans have this need to always look like they're doing something, otherwise they don't, they aren't producing or they're not contributing to something.

And I, I do think we have a society that literally, it's kind of part of ingrained in your upbringing as an Asian person.

I could say, you know, you know, I think that saying, you know, idle hands is idle minds, idle hands, whatever the devil's work or whatever.

But I think there's some, there's.

There's that mentality that, you know, if we aren't doing something, were up to no good, whatever it might be, whether it's self, you know, satisfaction, or it could just be, you know, you're lazy or perception of it or whatever.

So I recall many times in my career seeing a lot of my colleagues.

And I'm guilty of it, too.

Especially when I was in inside sales.

Oh, yeah, you just reminded me, especially at inside sales, we would make it look like we were on calls all the time and we were dialing freaking weather.

We were dialing like our buddy down the other route, like, whatever it would be just to make it look like we were being productive.

And they didn't care because they're like, oh, you made 100 calls today.

Yeah, made 100 calls today.

You know, wow.

Seven of them happened to be to the guy down the, down the aisle.

But yeah, I made my 100 calls.

Yeah.

Like, yeah.

Oh, gosh.

And.

But the ultimate bottom line is, is, okay, that's great.

You look busy.

But what's the end results?

Did it move your little marker forward towards your goal?

Right.

And.

And it sucks because, you know, as a creative person, there are days I will just go into a massive, like, frenzy of creativity and then I come out afterwards going, well, what the hell was that for?

But I went down that rabbit hole and I was busy.

But did it result in anything?

No.

And I think that's a problem in communication, especially when you work with larger teams, is you do have people who genuinely believe that their busy work is contributing to something.

And so let me ask you about this, Ben, is because, you know, you work with a lot of teams and you consult on, you know, increasing communication and all that.

How do you address it when you know this person is a hard worker, but how do you.

How do you address it?

If can we focus them in, in this direction versus them doing a bunch of little things and not completing a task maybe, versus focus just on this and finish this task?

Like, how would you approach that?

Because I'm.

That's like a billion dollar question.

But how would you approach it?

No, no.

And, and you're right.

I mean, it starts with company culture.

You know, what are the things that are being measured?

What are the KPIs?

What, you know, what, what are the okrs?

What, what are the things that people are measuring every single day?

And what are you being compensated on?

What are you being rewarded for?

And you know, a lot of people, you're right, they're being rewarded for the fact that they made a hundred calls, the fact that two of those calls ended up making money.

Well, they just say, well, if you put in enough calls, you're going to make more, you're going to make more sales.

And the question is, my argument is if you're making better calls, you're going to make more Sales.

And I think that people need to be focused on the right results, like, what are the things that we really should be measuring?

What are the things that we really should be paying attention to that we should be focused on?

And I think that a lot of organizations focus on, well, you know, Google does this, so we need to do this, or IBM does this and we need to do this, or, or McKinsey told us that we need to focus on this.

So therefore we need to do that because we paid them, you know, a million five.

And I think we need to sit there as organizations and say, it doesn't really matter what everybody else measures.

The question is, what are we measuring?

That's important to us.

And people ask me who says, well, what are, what are the things that you measure on a daily basis?

I go, did I make a bigger profit?

Is there more money in my pocket this year than there was last year?

After taxes, after all the, all, after all the bills have been paid, after everything is said and done, you know, did I make more money than last year?

That's what I measure.

And I sit there and say, you know, and then, then it comes down to customers, you know, things like customer satisfaction, that comes down to, you know, customer loyalty.

How many clients that I did, I did, I gained this year, how many clients did I lose this year?

Things like that, those are the things that are, that matter to me now.

Those don't matter to everybody, but those are the things that matter to me.

And it.

And I drive my way that I conduct myself on a daily, weekly and monthly basis based on, on that philosophy.

I don't look and sit there and say, what did I make this week?

Or did I, how many phone calls did I make this week?

How, how many jobs did in this week?

I'm looking at, say, what's the net result on a year over year basis?

And, you know, looking more long term, it allows me to be more strategic.

Now I'm not looking for 10,000, you know, new clients or 10,000 new sales on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

You know, my attitude is if I have six clients on a yearly basis, I've done extremely well.

So it's a different philosophy, it's a different focus based on what you're trying to do.

And I can spend 2, 3, 4 hours of a day not talking to anybody and just researching, because that, researching gives me the information that I need to be able to go talk to the client and say, okay, based on this, this, this, this and this, I think we should be doing that.

It's a balancing act, don't you think?

It's very much a balancing act.

And different companies are going to answer this question completely differently.

You know, you just, you just made me think of my worst nightmare.

My.

My nemesis in life, CRMs.

Let me tell you, kids, I think I've gotten almost fired every single time or possibly written up on my incredible CRM data entering skills.

Or lack thereof.

Or lack thereof.

But here's the funny part, and I'll tell you why.

There's, there's multiple reasons why that is.

We probably should make that one episode alone about why can't we figure out CRM.

And I have reasons.

But that being said is this is.

If we were in an altruistic world, if we were consistent and we kept a clean CRM.

So every meeting you went to, you just went, it only takes five minutes to update.

Theoretically, it is a great tool for both the business side and for you to keep your conversations organized so you know what stage you're at.

So it's a reminder of, oh, yeah, I forgot to talk to Bill about this, right?

Why people like me can't freaking get the time to do it.

That's a different issue altogether.

But I will say there were times when I was trying to be a good girl, partially because I think I got written up and I was like, well, I better clean this crap up real fast.

And I went down that rabbit hole and I did put everything in there that I, you know, could and all that stuff.

And it took hours.

It took days, quite frankly, for me to that.

Because I was that good.

It took days to update my CRM.

But all that busy work, one would have assumed that it benefited to some end.

And I'll tell you the truth, it did reject shite for me because what you would think of, like, oh, re evaluating, oh, I'm on this level here.

This is what I need to do.

It's only as good.

That busy work that you've done is only good for up to that moment, for that moment in time, right?

So if you could find a way to do your busy work a little bit smaller and more consistently, it might be a better payoff.

But all that data dump that I did, it didn't, it didn't.

Didn't pay back, if you want to call it that.

But I thought I had accomplished something because then now I walked back and I said, look what I did.

You can't fire me now because I was a good girl.

But what did it net the business in the end?

Bull crap, right?

I didn't close an additional deals based on it, but, but I made my management happy because everybody.

But it probably kept you, it might have kept you from, from closing a deal.

So here's, here's my thought process on this.

Here's my thought process on this.

Sales people should be doing sales things.

Salespeople should have admin staff where you can, you can do voice notes saying blah blah, blah, blah, blah blah blah in the car, email it to your admin and your admin puts it into the CRM.

It's called AI now, whatever.

It doesn't really matter whether it's AI driven or whether it's human driven.

That's a good use of time.

Is the fact that to actually have to have the sales rep sitting there and entering data into a system keeps them from doing the work that they should be doing now.

The good news is if the CRM is up to date and if all those things are up to date, you can sit there and say, all right, wait a second, I need to talk to this person in three weeks.

It's in the CRM in three weeks from now.

I know that I need to give this person a call and this is what we talked about three weeks ago.

Great.

That's important data.

Yeah.

Or being able to be able to pull up information when the client asks you for, for X amount of information because they're trying to make a decision having that right information.

The CRM is excellent.

The trick is that that's what admin grade admin staff should do is they should free sales reps up to be able to deal with the clients, deal with the minutia, deal with the stuff that they need to deal with in order to be able to make the company more successful, more profitable.

They will more than pay their way for admin staff by being freed up from having to come into the office just to enter stuff into the CRM.

So I, I am, I'm a big advocate that CRMs are important things and they're good.

I just don't think that a good use of a salesperson's time is to sit there and be, have to enter all the information into the CRM themselves.

I, I'm sure it's evolved over time.

I'm, I'm, you guys, I've been away from the sales world close to 10 years.

I get it, I get it.

Get, I get it.

But I, I, and I don't want to belabor that, but busy work is busy work is busy work.

So this would also go to tps Reports whatever industry you're in, you guys.

And again.

Well I just made another reference that the Gen Z is probably have no clue but you should Office Space best movie ever when it comes to like the office work.

But you know, but filling out forms or whatever for the sake of it is absolutely not going to move the ball forward from an administrative perspective.

Sure there are reasons why I think that's where from a management level perspective is to balance that kind of work.

And like you say is there a platform or going to hire someone for it to fill in those gaps so your productive team is doing what their job is which is following through with your clients.

Don't get me wrong but some of this other stuff where like the the business needs to know well did CM make 40 calls this month?

You know, on site calls this month.

Like if you're going to micromanage, that's your different issue.

But like okay, if this person, you know, you know, finished the project B, you know, but we gave them project C and so they had to figure out.

But project C is not for like immediate timeline.

But Project B is like again busy work of making them do Project C when they had Project B to do.

And I'm really trying to go general to make it like not so much about sales and stuff like that, but that kind of busy work that may or may not have a net result or busy work to offload your boss's work or your colleagues work because your colleague showed incompetence.

And then now you have to make up for your freaking colleagues busy work because they're not doing their job.

I mean that's what we're also talking about.

Busy work.

Busy work doesn't necessarily mean mindless.

It could also be work that shouldn't necessarily be needed to do.

Right?

Like that or on your place.

Yeah, maybe now you're making me think a bit more.

So is busy work a manifestation of weakness and processes?

Absolutely it is.

And I will.

I would.

That was going to be the next part that I got to is that it is.

It's systems and processes, right?

Companies that have good systems and processes and build, you know, technology solutions where technology solutions are called for to be able to do the work that people do.

I mean I've heard stories especially in the insurance industry where the the report has to go into three different systems and there's some poor fool that has to sit there and literally copy and paste information from one system to another system because no one's sit there and built an API that just automatically ports the Information over.

So therefore, three hours a day is being spent or seven hours a day is being spent by somebody just sitting there copying and pasting from one system to another.

So if you sit there and say, what, what's important?

What can be automated?

What can be thrown away?

You know, what.

What are we doing?

Just because we've always done it.

Yeah.

Versus what are we doing that is important, but it's not important that Sia does it or Ben does it.

It's important that it gets done.

How do we build a technological solution that be able to pull the information that Sia is already doing anyway and be able to pull that into reports so Sia doesn't have to cut a report every month just.

Just to make her boss happy.

Her boss is just going to automatically get a report because the system will just generate.

Will just.

It'll just get generated in email to them regardless.

And I think that we need to think about systems and processes of how we organize our day, our weeks or years, and in order to be able to maximize the time of, of the people who work for us, to be able to enable them to focus on the stuff that's important and, and move away from the minutia.

So we need to, you know, we need to get going on this and land this thing.

But I'm giving the last word to you.

No, I.

Look, I, I've got nothing more to say other than busy work.

Yes, I, I know that for many it feels like we're moving the ball forward, but it also could be an indicator of, again, lack of clarity and direction on your position on what your task is at hand.

Right.

And also it could also be an indicator of poor operations efficiency.

Right.

So when we're talking about busy work, it's not to imply that you're busy, busy doing like, you know, my staple or my stapler.

Like.

No, we're not talking about that.

But we are talking about sometimes maybe going down a path, thinking you are being effective when you're not.

Right.

And that also is.

It can be a very big problem if you aren't aware of it or you are aware of it.

Like me at Inside Sales, dialing and smiling my buddies down the road.

You know what I mean?

Like, you know, it's.

But to what end?

Right?

And I feel like ultimately in the end it is possibly you could hurt yourself in the end, whatever it might be.

So that's it in a nutshell as far as.

Yeah, that's all I got to say about that because I do have more.

I want to say, but I think I'd be changing the subject, so.

Perfect.

Leave it there.

I'm Ben.

I'm Sia.

And we'll see you soon.

Hey, hey.

Hey.

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