Tips for Ditching Busy Work
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Are you often side-tracked at work or given assignments that aren’t relevant to your role? Many professionals are being taken advantage of to complete work their boss or colleague doesn’t want to do themselves. Constantly assigned irrelevant work can decrease your job performance, damage relationships with coworkers, and lead to burnout. These three factors can lessen your chances of promotions or lead you to lose interest in your career path.
Here’s how you can avoid busy work to supercharge your career:
Get specific about prioritizing your tasks
Think about how relevant your current tasks are to moving the needle in your role or business. Is it part of your job’s expectations, or is this task required to satisfy your customer’s needs and increase sales? If the task is crucial to your core responsibilities, then it’s important and not something you can avoid (Fast Company). Eisenhower’s urgent/important matrix can be very helpful for distinguishing busy work from important work:
Important and urgent - If the work falls into this zone, chances are it should be at the top of your todo list! This is something critical to the core of the business you work with and has a nearing deadline.
Important but not urgent - This is the golden zone. Projects in this area are both important to your’s organization’s bigger goals and you also have enough time to work on them.
Not important but urgent - This is primetime busywork! Tasks in this zone can often prevent you from doing your most important work in categories 1 and 2. Their urgency will give you the impression that they must be done right away, but really you should delegate them or reschedule them. Answering unimportant emails from people who need a response “right away” is a common source of this kind of busy work.
Not important and not urgent - Tasks that fall into this category are also busywork. It’s best to avoid these all together by ignoring or cancelling them.
However, if you find that you are repeatedly getting assigned work in categories 3 and 4, speak with your management team or, for business owners, consider hiring additional help.
Schedule times to check emails
Answering urgent and unimportant emails is a common type of busy work. It’s easy to check your email anytime you have downtime throughout the day. However, constantly looking at your inbox can have you adding more tasks to your to-do list than necessary. Instead, schedule a few times during the day to check and respond to emails (LinkedIn).
Delegate tasks
When you begin to feel overwhelmed with tasks, it’s either time to ask for help if possible or be ruthless in your prioritization. Especially if they’re tasks that are not relevant to your role or a game changer for your business. If you’re an entry level employee and you feel as though you are not getting meaningful work, schedule a check in with your boss to discuss how you can improve the situation.