How To Get Out The “Busyness” Syndrome

I know you are wondering, what is the “busyness” syndrome? Let me explain. Its 8:00 am, Monday morning, an online health food home based business owner is in her office busily working. She has spent about three hours reading and responding to emails, answering incoming telephone calls and returning telephone calls, reading industry related updates, creating her grocery list for tonight’s dinner and perusing web pages on the internet. She decides to file a stack of invoices since it is consuming most of her desk. After filing, she decides to read an article about the benefits of organic supplements from a health journal, (she missed the opportunity to read last night). Currently, it is 11:00 am; she must leave her office to attend a health fair at her community’s health center for 11:30 am. She will be giving away samples of a new line of products which is an excellent opportunity to get new clients and opinions about her new product. However, when she returns to her office, she is annoyed because she failed to bring all the product samples to the health fair and she forgot her business cards. Her morning was so busy; she could not find time to efficiently prepare for the fair.

Yes, the business owner above did have a busy morning, but she spent the morning working on mundane tasks that were not very productive or in line with her goal for the day: attending a health fair. Does this business owner sound like you? Do you start your day without an objective or targeted goal(s)? Are you busy just being busy without any productivity? Do you see results? If so, you are wasting time because you are not working towards anything in particular, just whatever comes your way.

To get out of the “busyness syndrome”, stop spending your day working on low priority tasks. Now, you may be thinking, “What are low priority tasks?” and “How will I know that they are low priority?” Well this is it in a nutshell: Any task that is not consistent with your goal is a low priority task. Let’s look at the above example again: The online healthy food business owner goal for the day should have been to prepare for her booth at the community health fair, so if she had planned her day and defined a goal for the day, her first three hours of her day should have looked something like this:

Today’s Action List
Goal: Prepare All Items For Community Health Fair Booth Setup
1. Prepare All Sample Products
2. Create a Sign-In Sheet for Booth Visitors
3. Pack Business Cards
4. Pack Company Brochures
5. Pack car with all the above items at 10:00 am
6. Leave For Health Fair @ 10:15 am
7. Send Follow Up Correspondences To Booth Visitors From Sign In Sheet

Now it’s your turn, create a goal for tomorrow and write down all the tasks that are required to complete the goal. Depending upon the deadline of the goal, tasks can and should be distributed throughout the duration of the week. Block time in your planner to complete each task and do not allow any interruptions during that time. You will be amazed at your productivity. Your action list can also serve as a checklist. Do not discard the action list that you have created for this project. It can later serve as a Check List whenever this projected is required of you again. Create a folder and file the steps from your Action List. For example, the above Action List can be filed as Health Fair Booth Setup Checklist. You now have created a system to adhere to whenever you attend this type of an event.

Primarily start your day working on tasks that support your goal. Delegate mundane tasks or schedule them throughout the week to be accomplished once your priority tasks are completed.

Unleash yourself from the “busyness syndrome”. Remember being busy is not the answer to productivity but being busy getting the right things done will get you the results that you desire and skyrocket your productivity.

© 2007 Bridgette Boudreaux