There’s a counter-intuitive Buddhist line that has caught with me: “Don’t simply do one thing, sit there.”

It’s significantly helpful in instances of uncertainty and even panic, when the temptation is to observe the herd, or take motion for the sake of taking motion. Generally the most effective motion to tackle a scenario is not any motion in any respect.

For me, it’s a reminder to reply, to not react.

It’s additionally an antidote to the “tradition of busyness” that psychologist and Kellogg professor Adam Waytz explored on this month’s Harvard Enterprise Assessment. He writes:

“Busyness has develop into a standing image. Individuals additionally think about those that exert excessive effort to be “morally admirable,” no matter their output.”

There’s an phantasm of productiveness that comes from being continuously busy.

It may also be arduous to separate the pressing from the essential, which Dwight D. Eisenhower famously framed in a 1954 speech:

“I’ve two sorts of issues, the pressing and the essential. The pressing aren’t essential and the essential are by no means pressing.”

Johns Hopkins professor Meng Zhu explored this “urgency bias” in a 2018 research and located that people are liable to spend time on duties that merely appear pressing as an alternative of duties that aren’t urgent, however ought to hold extra weight.

The tectonic shifts in enterprise proper now, from generative AI to the way forward for work, would require us to rise above that tradition of busyness.

Listed here are a couple of associated cartoons I’ve drawn through the years: