Some business owners tend to think that procrastination is when their staff deliberately slack off. But what’s more common in today’s business landscape is a term known as “busy work.”
Busy work starts and ends with distractions in your office. If your whole team isn’t working together on a productive schedule, you could be losing out on clients, time and revenue for your business.
Worse, sometimes this busy work isn’t even clocked by your team as procrastination – in fact, you might be doing it yourself!
Busy Work: A Definition
Busy work is a rather insidious term native to modern businesses.
Whenever you’re doing work that makes you feel busy (like emails or meetings) but you’re not actually progressing an important project, you may be succumbing to busy work.
There are plenty of daily tasks that make you feel good when you complete them. But a lot of these don’t actually contribute to the growth of your business, either in a meaningful way, or simply not as effectively as other tasks.
You can spend a lot of time doing busy work before you realize you should be doing high priority work – which in turn will sap your energy.
The key point here is you can unknowingly procrastinate important tasks by focusing on busy work instead.
How Can You Prevent Busy Work From Holding Your Team Back?
Now busy work and the procrastination it brings can be overcome. But the key is consistency. You need to stick to these methods every week if you want to see progress, especially in avoiding distractions.
Here are some ways you can rid your office of unnecessary busy work:
#1 Trial “Sprints” With Your Team
Sprints are a trendy new term for short bursts of focused work among your team dedicated to progressing specific goals.
The aim here is to be extremely focused on just one thing and to work quickly and effectively as a unit.
Say for example your team had a client to onboard. You may decide to take Monday morning to turn off all phones and emails. You would then declare that at the end of a three hour period, the client needs to be onboarded.
Everyone would then “sprint” to finish this task. By removing distractions and focusing on a sole task, you can eliminate unnecessary busy work. The deadline too removes procrastination and encourages teamwork.
#2 Have You Heard Of WIPs?
A WIP is short for work in progress. This is a document that states all of the goals your team needs to complete before a project is considered finished.
It should also have deadlines for completion and who is responsible for managing individual tasks.
By having a WIP document, all team members will know exactly when their work needs to be done and what they’re responsible for.
This way they won’t be confused as to what work they should be doing and the deadline will give them a sense of urgency to finish rather than procrastinate.
#3 Ensure All Priorities Are Made Clear
If you as the business owner highlight to your team what tasks need to be completed first and foremost, then everyone will know what they should be working on.
One clear cause of procrastination & busywork is choice paralysis: not knowing what work to work on during the day.
Giving your team clear priorities will remove this and give them a reason to start work.
#4 Nothing Wrong With A Bit Of Incentivising
Sometimes all people need to start work is a reason why. And sometimes that reason only needs to be novel: like a Friday lunch at the local pub!
Incentivising will give your team the extra nudge they may need to work a little harder and faster.
Most people will procrastinate starting a project even just a little bit, but if they think something is in it for them, this may be the catalyst they need to get it done quicker.
This is another great way to remove the appeal of busy work. Your teams goal – finishing their high priority task – will align with your goal, rather than spending time on tasks that contribute to neither.
Let Us Get Busy On Your Finances!
It’s not easy to overcome busy work, but neither does it require a herculean effort. Just chip away at it day after day and before you know it, you’ll be an extremely productive team.
As we’ve mentioned, the best way to stop procrastinating for your team is to remove distractions cleverly disguised as “busy work.”
By handing off management of your finances to our accountants and bookkeepers, you’ll free up your mental space to focus on what really matters. It’ll be one less worry to distract you from getting work done.
So call The A Firm today for your free meet and greet!