That thing, about failing to prepare and you’re preparing to fail? Admittedly you don’t see a lot of evidence of it as a deliberate policy or business strategy, but it sure seems evident that behind the scenes, sometimes, there’s not a lot going on.
Take your pick from today’s news and whether it’s a big public organisation or a huge private multinational, once the spotlight swings in there’s not much ‘been so busy, haven’t really had time to think about ‘insert clusterfuck as a result’ shadow to hide in.
Sure, everyone’s busy. No-one wants to be seen to not be. But looking busy is really contagious, even now - or, perhaps even more so, with those ‘fortunate’ to choose some dimension of remote working will attest - even when we can see that ,with the exception of the super-busy, much of the 100% of the work day is about, what, 15% actually productive?
And I’m not sure either that the super-busy are ‘more productive’. They seem to mostly thrive on the thrill-drive of processing stuff.
What prompted the thought was that I’d been catching up on newsletters - and oh the irony! No billable hours there, but productivity can come in strange forms. And something which I found a lovely description for - the ‘work-noise balance’; something much nicer that the dreadful work/life knife-twist. Which, which I’d also not realised places the emphasis on the first act, rather than the more important second four letter word.
Anyway, in a lovely article in BLAG (Better Letters Magazine - https://bl.ag/) titled ‘The Inspiring World of Vintage French Reference Alphabets”, I came on this rather surprising line (although I probably shouldn’t have been surprised to find it in the context of lettering design. Me with my unconscious bias’…);
“…we learn everything from language to behaviour by copying….”
Because if the authors’ assertion is so - and how to verify this? It’s going to be a much longer piece of research work surely - I jumped right to the idea of ‘imitative learning’ (that thing of how children learn eating manners or growing up wanting to smoke) is such a powerful force it appears to lead us into the idea that busy=good and not realise all kinds of busy is not always always useful.
And ‘useful’ time, which I much prefer to ‘productive’, i.e. making things better, fixing stuff, rather than root of the latter - “producing or able to produce large amounts…” seems a much better gauge on what to focus your time on. Being ‘useful’ often comes in small bursts and that’s ok. More is not always better in helping us see clearly.
But nature (and this designer) abhore a vacuum, hence the strange draw to make something more successful with the space (and time.)
And my conclusion, at the net result of an hour’s tapping away at this nonsense, is that not being busy can often leave you gearing up to fail as much as the next busy person. Otherwise you end up pouring out any old rubbish. Sometimes idle hands should be left just so.
