Effort vs Impact

At the end of a long day you feel you didn't accomplish anything; long week and still feel you wasted it; a complete month you have nothing to show. And your boss is not happy that something is not done. Now you wear your victim cap and tell everyone that cares to listen (or atleast pretend to do so) how unfairly you've been treated that despite your stellar "efforts" no one recognizes and blah blah. Sounds familiar? Most of us have fallen or keep falling into this trap, hopefully not often. In the end, we are paid for results and hardly for efforts. Our customers wont pay us for "efforts", not do we pay our vendors for their "efforts", then why do we expect that our boss applauds our efforts if we have very little to show. Sometimes it is helpful to catch ourselves "busy being busy". Such busy-but-no-results happen for several reasons:

1. You are spending a lot of time in office no doubt, but that also includes some or all of periodic checking of twitter feeds, updating facebook status, checking out latest cricket score, ultra long lunches, interesting water cooler discussions and all that (I can hear some of my friends asking me to add yoga, zumba etc., also to the list)! Not only these activities take time, but also will not give an uninterrupted stretch to do something meaningful.

2. Rework from a poor quality job

3. Procrastinating on something because you do not have competence or required skills to do the job and hesitant to admit it.

4. Poor work ethics in terms of when you come, when you go, how you respond to team member queries etc., etc.,

5. Taking on tasks that is of no value to the boss

6. Not knowing what is good-enough and instead chase perfection

7. Being very rigid about everything and keep doing things in the same way as you were doing several years ago

How do we fix it? First step is always to identify that you are busy-being-busy. Once this is done we have to see the "excuses" we are making to not move the needle. Put some structure to make sure that we do not fall into this trap. A daily self-assessment that asks whether we gave our best in everything we did.

Do you know more methods to fix such things? More reasons why we fall into the trap? Love to hear.