Are you in control of your hours at work this week?

Do you have agreements?

If I’m not busy, I’m not a success.
I can’t go home early.

We hear it all the time don’t we? At the trade counters, office space, workplace
or networking events and conferences. What’s that one first question we
always ask?

Are you busy?

This is the ultimate question to which we defer. This is our subconscious
measure of how successful that person is. Crazy isn’t it.
Are you busy?

Super busy? I worked 80 hours this week.

Wow! You must be successful.

Logically it just doesn’t stack up. I’d much rather achieve what I need to
achieve through a nicely developed action plan which takes me 40 – 50 hours
a week and get more done than Mr busy every week of the month.

This is why we encourage busy Dads to track time, to create boundaries and
manage expectations, because it can be easy to fall in to the competitive
race of simply measuring ourselves on how busy we are at work.

I’m not suggesting here that sometimes season and work pressures mean we
will have to pull the longer hours, but we should be able to see this coming
down the line and manage expectations across other roles we play.

If someone else controls our hours and our diaries we are setting ourselves up
for a fall. We’ve heard it mentioned before where busy people have meetings
put in their diaries by their line management at 7am for example, knowing full
well this affects things at home.

The competitive and toxic culture for doing more, more, more has to stop and
I think the checks and balances on that start closer to home.

Maybe next time instead of asking if someone is busy,
try “are you happy?”…