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18 Examples of Busy Work

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Busy work is low value work that is performed to keep busy. The following are illustrative examples.

Customer Perceptions

Busy work may improve customer perceptions and is often performed to create an atmosphere of professionalism. For example, customers may positively perceive shop staff who are busy organizing clothes on a rack that is already organized as opposed to standing idly or engaged in conversation with coworkers.

Discipline

An organization may use busy work simply to build or maintain discipline. This is common in the military with activities such as drill, cleaning and memorizing regulations.

Sidelining

Busy work may be used as a political strategy to sideline someone who you perceive as incompetent or a threat to your own ambitions. For example, a manager who assigns a pointless project to a talented young employee who they view as a threat to their job. Likewise, executives may assign busy work to entire divisions of a company if it will advance their own ambitions.

Tactical

Using busy work as a tactic to look productive. For example, temporarily engaging in busy work when your reporting manager is around.

Malicious Compliance

Malicious compliance is the use of an organization's own rules against itself. Busy work is one tool of malicious compliance. For example, an airline customer service manager who assigns employees to obscure tasks in the middle of a peak travel time. Technically such a manager may not be breaking any rules but is making things worse for customers and the airline.

Toil

Toil is work that doesn't feel rewarding or challenging because it is low value or doesn't require your talents. Efficient organizations automate toil, outsource it or heavily optimize it to get it done with minimal effort. Inefficient organizations may retain toil or expand it as a form of busy work that justifies their employment. For example, a city hall with thousands of employees that fears that process simplification or self-service tools for city residents will lead to many layoffs. In this case, inefficient paperwork that is low value but may be viewed as a source of job security.

Resistance to Change

Employees may value the status quo and resist any attempt to get rid of busy work simply because they fear change. For example, a weather office that faxes information to other weather offices that resists a system implementation that will automate this data sharing.

Mediocrity

Individuals may purposely find busy work for themselves in order to appear busy without risking work that people will notice too much. Generally speaking, busy work is low pressure as compared to work that is important and valuable whereby people will notice and criticize. As such, busy work is often adopted by those who are happy with mediocrity.

Bikeshedding

Bikeshedding, or Parkinson's law of triviality, is a tendency to focus on low value tasks that are easy to understand while ignoring large difficult problems that need a solution. For example, a company CEO who focuses on buying small interesting companies that seem cool while failing to address the fact that the firm has a failing business model and is quickly burning through cash reserves.

Norms

Norms can impact busy work. For example, in Japan it is a norm that employees can't go home before their boss such that employees try to look busy and wait for the boss to go home even if they have nothing at all to do.

Respect

It is possible for a culture to respect hard effort over easy results. In this case, inefficient processes may gain you more respect as you are always working late whereas the individual who makes processes simpler and gets more done may not be respected as they go home early and are intolerant of busy work.

Good Intentions

In many cases, busy work is motivated by good intentions that simply aren't fully connected to reality. For example, an offsite meeting to stimulate creativity that most participants view as a waste of time. In some cases, an employee is given an abstract mission such as "increasing innovation" and creates busy work in an attempt to fulfill this mission.

Education

Historically, K-12 education embraced the term busy work for exercises that keep the class busy so that they teacher can perform an activity such as providing individual attention to a student. Independent self-study is an essential element of learning. However, the term busy work focuses on the value of exercises from the teacher's perspective as it frees their time. As such, busy work is associated with mindless drills or exercises that have questionable connection to the subject area such as coloring pictures in English class.

Mission Creep

Busy work can occur when an individual, team, department or bureaucratic organization expands upon their mission into areas of questionable value. For example, a police department that begins aggressive digital surveillance of city residents without ever having received this as a mandate from city government.

Corruption

Corruption such as a government that pays its friends in the construction industry to build useless infrastructure such as oversized roads and tunnels in the countryside. This typically involves some sort of value transfer to politicians such as campaign contributions, wining & dining and high "speaking fees" at the end of their political career.

Boondoggle

A boondoggle is an expensive project that has failed but continues due to an inability to accept failure. In this case, the busy work is devoted to a project that everyone has realized will never meet its objectives. For example, a government IT project with a budget of $30 million that eventually balloons to $1.3 billion paid out to vendors that have failed to deliver any actual value.

Vanity Metrics

Work to increase metrics that feel exciting and trendy but are relatively meaningless to your core goals. For example, an owner of a cafe who becomes obsessed with their social media metrics such as likes or followers when this does almost nothing to improve the cafe's revenue or loyal customer base as most of their social media followers don't live in the same city as the cafe.

Displacement Activity

A displacement activity is a behavior motivated by frustration or stress as opposed to an action taken to achieve goals. The classic example is an animal stuck in an overly small pen in a zoo that paces back and forth out of frustration for not being able to act on instincts such as hunting. Humans also demonstrate displacement activity such as an accountant with an overly predictable job who desires creativity and social interaction so they create activities designed to satisfy these motivations even if they don't benefit the organization in any way. For example, the accountant may book a large number of meetings, start political battles and gossip simply to make life more interesting. In some cases, a professional manages to devote all of their time to politic intrigue as opposed to the mundane work expected of their role.
Overview: Busy Work
Type
Definition
Low value work that is performed to keep busy.
Also Known As
Busywork
Make-work
Related Concepts

Productivity

This is the complete list of articles we have written about productivity.
Attention Span
Automation
Bikeshedding
Busy Work
Discipline
Division Of Labor
Efficiency
Employee Productivity
Flow Theory
Labor Intensive
Low Productivity
Practical
Proactive
Process
Productivity Analysis
Productivity Goals
Productivity Mgmt
Routine Work
Self-Discipline
Social Loafing
Teamwork
Telecommuting
Time Boxing
Toil
Tools
Work
Work Attitude
Work Decisions
Work Ethic
More ...
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