Handling Busy Part 2

Busyness is often mistaken for a badge of honor when it's really in direct conflict with productivity — motion gets confused for progress. Lifehack.org's list of reasons not to be proud of being busy makes the case well.

In Handling Busy Part 1, the focus was on three things easily forgotten under pressure: your situation isn't as unique as it feels, emotional intelligence wins, and slowing down speeds things up. This installment covers four practical tactics: finish the job, communicate less, squeak properly, and manage up.

Finish the Job

Harvard Business Review's Beware the Busy Manager offers a simple equation: right focus plus high energy equals purposeful activity. Once the right focus is identified, finishing it matters more than moving quickly to the next thing — unfinished work is what fouls up transactions daily, and completing each piece fully saves time and money downstream.

Communicate Less

A common reaction to being busy is "busyness transference" — more emails, more voicemails, more notes, on the theory that more communication makes the work easier. It usually just multiplies the noise everyone has to process. Practicing economy of communication — batching complete thoughts into fewer, more thorough messages rather than a constant drip — respects everyone's time, including your own.

Squeak Properly

Noise proves nothing, often a hen who has laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.

Escalating a real need is essential; escalating everything is just noise. Squeaking well means three things: eliminate guesswork by stating exactly what's needed, reduce the work required by including all relevant information upfront, and focus only on what's actually controllable.

Manage Up

When everything is labeled a priority, nothing functions as one. Whoever holds the solution to a problem has their own competing priorities — the job in managing up is tying today's ask directly to tomorrow's shared goal. "This needs to move up the queue because it's tied to a 300-unit builder relationship coming online this year" creates alignment in a way that "this is urgent" never will.

Handling busy well requires empathy, deliberate slowing down, and consistent attention to emotional intelligence — not more hours in the day, just better use of the ones already there.