Insurance Consultant Tip Of The Day:
I hate the word busy.
I hate the word busy for so many reasons, let me list a few so you know how much I hate this word:
- Busy is relative, my retired mother is busy going to the beach
- People complain all the time about being busy but can’t ever say what they are busy doing
- In an agency, isn’t being a busy a positive thing? Last I checked if the phones aren’t ringing that’s a bad bad sign
- The whole point of you going to work is for someone to keep you busy
- Busy is used as an excuse far too often for not accomplishing something, what you should say is simply this is not a priority for me
- Busy could be 2 unanswered emails and 1 phone call that needs to be returned or 78 open memos
- Busy people don’t leave the office at 5 unless they are going home to finish projects
In every single agency, I have ever been to the word busy comes up. Every one. I even put a swear jar in one office, the next person who said they were busy had to put $1 in the swear jar. We are in a busy epidemic apparently. What we need to say is, I have these items to complete today what is the biggest priority?
See the problem with the word busy is it makes the team feel like they can’t ask for help. It holds people captive to their work and wards off any team work.
One challenge we all have to break up with is the idea that we have to perfect at everything. I want every agency owner, team member and colleague of mine to awesome not busy. I know I’ll never be the best wife but I can be a pretty awesome one and that doesn’t come from having the cleanest home or the best dinner on the table promptly at 6 pm. I know I’ll never be the best agency consultant but I do know I will be the most awesome by making sure every agency I work with knows how much I care and by finding opportunities that inspire me to go the extra mile for them. We all put too much pressure on ourselves to do too many things and we end up burned out and doing nothing well. So let’s stop doing busy work and let’s start doing AWESOME work!
I think we all need to think about our use of the word busy and think instead if you have a certain amount of work to do how can you do it efficiently and effectively while having fun. Heck, even Snow White whistled while she worked!
Busy is for whiners, productive is for winners!
