There’s a counter-intuitive Buddhist line that has caught with me: “Don’t simply do one thing, sit there.”
It’s significantly helpful in occasions of uncertainty and even panic, when the temptation is to comply with the herd, or take motion for the sake of taking motion. Typically the very best motion to tackle a state of affairs is not any motion in any respect.
For me, it’s a reminder to reply, to not react.
It’s additionally an antidote to the “tradition of busyness” that psychologist and Kellogg professor Adam Waytz explored on this month’s Harvard Enterprise Overview. He writes:
“Busyness has turn out to be a standing image. Folks additionally contemplate those that exert excessive effort to be “morally admirable,” no matter their output.”
There’s an phantasm of productiveness that comes from being always busy.
It can be arduous to separate the pressing from the vital, which Dwight D. Eisenhower famously framed in a 1954 speech:
“I’ve two sorts of issues, the pressing and the vital. The pressing should not vital and the vital are by no means pressing.”
Johns Hopkins professor Meng Zhu explored this “urgency bias” in a 2018 examine and located that people are vulnerable to spend time on duties that merely appear pressing as a substitute of duties that aren’t urgent, however ought to hold extra weight.
The tectonic shifts in enterprise proper now, from generative AI to the way forward for work, would require us to rise above that tradition of busyness.
Listed here are a number of associated cartoons I’ve drawn through the years:
“If advertising and marketing saved a diary, this may be it.”
– Ann Handley, Chief Content material Officer of MarketingProfs
