Christmas has arrived. This is a magical time. We remember how we stood as children in front of the Christmas tree with big eyes and curiosity for the parcels, silently listening to stories and songs while the snow fell just as silently outside. After all the seasonal rush, the holidays have finally arrived now also for us adults. We step back and get distance. Relax and redirect our attention towards our loved ones. Different thoughts and a wider vision of life may come into our minds. We can enjoy a healing break full of contemplation, walks in the snow and joyful family dinners. Mind and body get a rest, our professional ambition paused momentarily until the new year.

We might reflect and see our busy job life from another point of view. Not from the productive, planning, executing side or simply getting through all the busy-busy-bang-bang work, but from our sense of achievement – what we now enjoy as a result of all that effort, and taking pride in knowing we tried our best. Different views and ideas flow up to our conscience that had to wait behind all this busy activity at work. We can watch it now from a different angle, in a clearer light. We might think about what it was good for at the end. With this calm and distance, now in our reflections we see that much of it was pointless.

In the middle of the usual work rush we have by far too few occasions where we allow ourselves to get this distance and honesty. Daily we get pulled into the busy-busy-bang-bang noise, feeling a necessity to react quickly, reacting with no time to think, no time to reflect or to choose what really makes sense. Our attention is more and more absorbed by the details and urgencies of these things. We become reactive and try to hurry with all what we do, up to a point where we do not even see any more our original purpose. We find ourselves overwhelmed in noisy activity for the sake of activity, creating the impression of motion – but without real progress. While we keep on moving like this through the weeks, we do not pay much attention to how we can create conditions to have more of these moments of distance like at Christmas. But how do we stop the noise and listen for the right signals?

The real job that we have to do is not trying to find how fast we can do what we already do but how do we do things differently and better to create new value and possibilities. Time for reflection is important as it provides a much needed course correction back to our purpose. Admitting this, we have to ask ourselves: Why is this hardly done in daily work? Why is it so difficult to shift behavior? To say “we are too stressed and busy” leads us back in a loop and that does not help to escape the trap – in contrary, if we say this, we surrender to the rat race and accept to live with the damage every day. And we might not even be fully aware of what the damage and cost is.

What I can say about the months of September and October this year, which were driven by a lot of work and overtime, effectiveness started to suffer as soon as the noisy workload took me off course. I lost my sense of direction and purpose because I had chosen to forsake reflection. The necessary timeouts were cut off by just too much overtime in the evening. I did things where I said after three days of fervent activity “Oh, this could have been much simpler, a more effective way would have created more benefit.”  If I only had had more time to think about a better approach… So many times I chose to ignore these thoughts, reacting to the busy-busy-bang-bang noise, having lost the sound of purpose in all the clamor. I was so busy getting it done…But to be honest, I was just running fast on cumbersome detours, running after the needs and issues of average or even pointless, purpose-failing approaches. Isn’t it frequently like that, that in the middle of all these details, issues and struggles of execution, we lose sight of the purpose? 

With this running, we are the driving force in a vicious circle – we are the ones who keep it spinning and thus it is us who have a choice to stop it. Ask yourself honestly: What is the relationship between the level of value that a busy piece of work produces and the degree of how busy (or overloaded) we are with all our tasks. Consider two backfiring effects in that relationship. First: Being busy and stressed causes a lack of time and distance to reflect and to identify better approaches. Second: Vice versa, the lack of better approaches causes us to be very busy and stressed. Because our not well reflected approaches are relatively ineffective and misdirected. This is keeping us busy with all the issues, insufficient results and even more negative side-effects that we or others have to deal with.  So there you go, the vicious cycle is closed and the rat race is accelerating.

Isn’t that a great insight, a great opportunity found? We are the ones who keep ourselves busy, thus we also have a choice to do it differently. To continue the struggle and just refine and make our action more efficient, is not an alternative, because this will always still suffer from a lack of effectiveness and a lack of right direction. We will just feed and accelerate the vicious circle to turn even faster and to create even more damage. The way to escape this “hamster-wheel” is to make ourselves aware that taking time for reflection will not make us slower, but will let us go the shorter way to better results. We escape the struggle if we admit that taking time will save time and increase impact.

It can be quite simple and does not need big seasonal events like Christmas. I have found one way to pull myself out: Just two weeks ago, in the middle of a pile of other tasks and deadlines, I was reviewing a draft newsletter, and while I was rushing through the detail changes a feeling of doubt got stronger and stronger as if this was the right thing to do at all. Would this have the impact that we needed? I noticed that I had lost focus on what we were trying to achieve. I had simply stopped thinking about what made a really good approach. Frustrated, I felt the wish to have a break, turn away from the computer, that darned mind-absorbing-machine, and to just take a piece of paper, a pencil and a coffee – and think. Get distance from the text and from the whole busy activity. Let my mind escape from the busy-busy-bang-bang mode, see what I have in front of me, think about what counts as a result and look at what I am doing right now. Why let my thinking be constrained and captured by my own prior choice of what seemed to be a common sense action? Why must possibilities be limited by the worriedness to execute fast enough an average approach with doubtful impact?

So I retreated to the coffee-corner and thought about what we knew, what we needed and what might be better options. As a result, I decided to talk to colleagues about what they usually took away from newsletters and adapted the frequency and content based on their feedback.

There are so many opportunities that are not seen, not thought about, not explored because we get too busy, too deep, and too quick to action. We miss the signals and opportunities for great leaps because we are doing noisy, ultimately unproductive quick fixes. I hope I will take a lot of this Christmas silence, reflection and distance into the New Year and I will remember to choose to go for the paper-pencil &coffee-approach more often. When I want to move faster, I will remind myself that I will be faster if I take the time to reflect. And more importantly, I will consider how I can make it a standard for the planning and review of new work-tasks. A piece of paper, a pencil, a coffee and the good feeling that this investment in reflection will pay back not only in saved time and effort,   but also in more value and more impact on what I do every day.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year full of distance, reflection and purpose.