The cult of busy | Hacker News Reader

The cult of busy

scottberkun.com

119 pointschanux29 comments

Man, the one huge hack I have learnt in working for corporate clients (we do PEN testing and other nefarious sneaky stuff :)) is to act and look busy/harried when you meet them.

If the high powered CEO your meeting thinks you have to be across the city meeting someone else in a minute or two they treat you with a lot more respect.

When I started with this stuff I was treated a lot like a lacky because they mostly talk to my boss and I was "just" turning up the "do" things. If you act busy they assume:

- your an important (high ranking) member of the company

- they are getting # prime star treatment from a company "executive"

- but most importantly they give you clear instructions, treat you like a real person and let you leave at a reasonable hour :)

It has even got to the point where, when meeting a client who is likely to respond this way, I often walk in pretending to be on the phone to my "secretary" [ha] giving hurried instructions or something.

Not a wonderful way to have to act, but they lap it up :(

Nitpick: the contraction of "you are" is "you're," not "your." You may also be treated with more respect by certain people if you learn to make this distinction.

Luckily it's one of the ones that doesn't affect readability too much. I'm not too interested in people who deal out respect based on minor grammar mistakes either, sorry :)

(the one that really gets me is when I split words I.e "thi sis". Can't spot them for the life of me)

Luckily it's one of the ones that doesn't affect readability too much.

This may just be me, but the your/you're thing trips me up like crazy. I usually have to re-read the sentence 2 or 3 times.

Ah, man. Sorry - I guess because it scans properly for me then I assumed it does for others.

I've thrown together a script to highlight your/you're on my HN comments(plus some other bits and pieces that get me) so hopefully I can improve things :)

(I really cannot recognise this and a few other types of mistakes; it's so damn annoying)

I enjoyed fragmented in my teenages but I don't understand why and how I actually hate it in my twenties :).

BTW thumbs up for real life social engineering :).

"thi sis" is clearly a typo. "you're/your" may mean that the person wasn't smart enough to figure out what to use

> I'm not too interested in people who deal out respect > based on minor grammar mistakes either, sorry :) The reason why I care about mistakes like "your" vs "you're" is when there's a limited number of cues available it can help to evaluate someone's competence.

In my mind the question is: If this person doesn't care enough to get this detail right--in this situation where it's about a detail I know about--how can I trust them to get the details right in a situation I know nothing about?

This approach does come with a downside--I probably spend too much time forming written communication trying to make sure it's "right". Like this comment, for example. :)

So, for me, it's not just about mindless adherence to arbitrary rules but a potential pointer to a deeper quality. However, you are free to continue not to be interested in me. :)

I guess that's social proof at work. I've also noticed I get a lot less hassle about my hourly rate with potential customers when I tell them up front that I'm already pretty booked up and can't promise when I'll be able to fit them in. This is almost always true anyway these days so at least I don't have to lie about it.

I suppose this could be interpreted as a variant of "playing hard to get".

Make sure someone doesn't actually call whilst you're doing the on-phone-to-secretary trick...

This reminds me of a great quote by Eric Hoffer:

"The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is, rather, born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life"

The "acting busy" part is a natural defense against managers (most of them) who would pile more work to those who finish early. If you finished early, the free time is not yours to play with. More work would be piled on your lap, without additional compensation. "Acting busy" actually cut down on additional work.

I was with a company which was obsessed with time tracking. We have to record time spent on bugs, features, meetings, design, documentation, etc. I sat through management meetings where the SVP pounded on us repeatedly to get our people to raise their time tracking percentage higher; being 50% tracked was a failure. Of course, people padded the numbers to make it upto 100%, and some overzealous individuals have more than 100% time tracked. It was a fucking retarded process.

'Time credit' - I like it. One thing that really bugs me is when you tell somebody about some entertaining or worthwhile pursuit of yours, and they reply saying 'It sounds interesting, but I don't have time for it unfortunately.' Thereby implying that you are lazy, and they are busy. Argh! Incidentally, has anyone ever conducted a study correlating number of emails sent within an organization and productivity? I've walked through large offices and seen nothing but Lotus Notes on peoples' screens (and I don't mean frivalous emails either, these are 'important' emails/memos).

One thing that really bugs me is when you tell somebody about some entertaining or worthwhile pursuit of yours, and they reply saying 'It sounds interesting, but I don't have time for it unfortunately.' Thereby implying that you are lazy, and they are busy. Argh!

I totally agree and have heard that before and thought the same thing.

I've walked through large offices and seen nothing but Lotus Notes on peoples' screens (and I don't mean frivalous emails either, these are 'important' emails/memos).

My experience:

  productivity == 1 / count(email + phone calls)

This may be something that is specific to programmers on small teams. I think many of these metrics apply to other areas in business such as Sales where there may be a relation between phone calls or emails and results (Or similarly in customer relations or customer service).

A common exception when programming is fixing bugs. When progress is being made there may be a flurry of communication as the source of the bug is identified and fixed.

Msybe they are taking offence that you are implying they have so little to do that they could take up your hobby as well.

[..] and they reply saying 'It sounds interesting, but I don't have time for it unfortunately.' Thereby implying that you are lazy, and they are busy.

Don't assume they're implying you're lazy, it could very well be a way of telling you that they don't find it that interesting without being rude. Besides, what's wrong with having different interests? Isn't it normal that one person finds something more interesting than the other, and therefore is willing to spend more of his spare time on it? That doesn't imply one is more lazy than the other, that just means they have different passions.

The first problem with saying 'I just don't have time for it' is its a bare-faced lie! I have to resist the urge to scream 'BUT YOU HAVE TIME TO WATCH EASTENDERS?!' ;)

The second problem is - why not just tell the truth? 'It doesn't really appeal to me, personally.' (talking about neutral subjects here, not requests for favours etc)

I think this makes a fairly good case for performance based and measured employment. I've never understood why most management seems obsessed with just simply doing and not what you're doing or how you're doing it. If you are operating at 100% all the time, there is no time to reflect, revise and improve the tasks your are responsible for. Perhaps it's due to the illusion that employers need to squeeze every last minute of productivity out you, when in fact productivity was never intended to be measured in minutes.

Yes, "I'm too busy" is usually code for "Your request is not important enough to me to bump the other things that I want to do off of my todo list."

So what? People can plead, barter, and argue with you if you say that something is not important to you, but "I'm too busy" is pretty unassailable. What, exactly, is so much better about giving a flat "no" - honesty? Please...you're still arbitrarily shutting down the request without giving a reason, and "not important enough to me" is as implicit in "no" as it is in "too busy".

To me, "busy" means that I have at least a hundred and fifty years worth of things that I'd like to do, and sixty years to get as far as I can with it. If you want to push your way in there, give me a damn good reason, and if you haven't, I have no problem saying whatever it will take to make you go away with as little interruption to my life as possible...

When someone tells you "I'm too busy" what they're really saying is "It's not a priority/important to me"

This reminds me of a useful quote I ran across recently:

"Never make someone else your priority when, to them, you are only an option."

Boy, do I know some managers who need to read that...

I think this is one of those things where the answer is "it depends". I understand people can seem busy to look productive. But people can also be idle under the guise of being effective, when they are just not working hard. Would you consider the Wally character from Dilbert effective?

A lot of employers will bait their workers with this lure of "time credit" through the lie of comp time. A lot of people never have the opportunity to take any of the unknown amount of "comp time" that they've amassed over the years because things are too busy at work.

For me, I find that busy happens most when I link my activities to external schedules. When those external schedules force a few things to come together at once, I get busy because I definitely want to do them all, but I may not have enough time to do them all at a leisurely pace.

There is a saying for which I don't know the origin that goes, "a patient man never waits." I think this article gets a little confused about the difference between busy and hurried. Effective and productive use of time implies business. Ineffectiave and/or unproductive use of time leads to hurriedness.

Some great points in this article. Busy is relative, just as time is. Unlike time, it can't be used as a measurement like it so often is - What are you guys working on? "We're really busy." Errr... that happens way too often.

All he said sounds good on paper but in reality people act and perceive differently. Acting busy has a number of perceived and real benefits, otherwise people won't do it.

Acting busy is perceived as important, perceived as in demand, perceived as hard working, perceived as the salary paid is well-earned, deters additional work, and deters disruption

In general it just makes you look like a super god. And that's why people do it.

For me, the question is "what is busy?" I try to balance my time between working on things I have to do, working on things I want to do, doing things that are fun but not productive, and enjoying a little time simply doing nothing at all.

You know, I've always noticed that busy people are always in a hurry. People tend to assume that the latter happens because of the former. But I've recently begun to believe that it's the other way around.

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