In your travels whenever you asked for help did you ever come across a person who’s go to response was ‘I’m too busy’ but then later on you see them very clearly lounging about and just killing time? As someone watching, this looks like very rude behaviour, they appear to have been lying.
But before we jump to conclusions let’s explore some possible explanations to this.
* The person isn’t aware of the fact that they clearly do have time.
* The person doesn’t want to help and they’re lying to you.
* They genuinely believe that they don’t have any time to spare
* They prioritize social media over you.
* They have time management issues
* They don’t have the discipline to stick to their schedule.
Let’s take the ones you can work with. I believe that being busy is a mindset. If it’s important enough you would make time for it. You would strip away the inessential and re-prioritize your schedule.
If it’s a speed issue, a great way to improve your efficiency is to improve your planning process by using thrashing which Steve McConnell talks about in his software project survival guide. It’s a great method that improves productivity tenfold.
The discipline for all of this can be developed.
So when you come across that person who simply doesn’t have time to do anything. You can tell them all these things. How each of these practices can be learned and developed so they can get more done in their day.
But then again they’ll probably tell you they don’t have the time to learn it, so c’est la vie 😛
Thomas Duggan 