The busy-ness meme
Darren Woolley, over at P3, has also noticed the busy-ness meme. You know the one: we are so busy as the moment, flat out. In fact I’ve noticed that people are greeting each other differently these days. It goes something like this:
“Hi Bob, how’s it going?”
“Busy, very busy. Hardly got time to scratch.”
“Yeh, me too. Flat out.”
“Time for a coffee?”
“Sure thing.”
We all say we are busy. It’s almost a badge of honour. I wonder what would happen if you said, “I have a bit of free time at the moment. It’s just the way I like it.”
Anyway, Darren goes on list some things that are wrong with business meetings and gives us some ideas on how to get more out of meetings. Well worth a read.
Shawn, author of Putting Stories to Work, is one of the world's leading business storytelling consultants. He helps executive teams find and tell the story of their strategy. When he is not working on strategy communication, Shawn is helping leaders find and tell business stories to engage, to influence and to inspire. Shawn works with Global 1000 companies including Shell, IBM, SAP, Bayer, Microsoft & Danone. Connect with Shawn on:
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Refreshingly, Bob Dick answered the “How has your day been?” with “Mercilessly Uneventful”.
I liked that one. 🙂
Cheers,
Andrew
Nice observation. I agree about the “importance” issue.
There is also a self-defence issue. If you are an employee and you answer: “Not busy” then someone might give you a huge stack of work!
In the context of answering requests for help, the response “I’m busy” really means “What you are asking is not important”.