Is being busy a good thing? Not when it leads to backache, obesity and burnout. Leadership coach Neil Jurd OBE says finding the time to switch off could lead to greater productivity 

A while ago I bumped into a friend. He asked how I was. I said “Busy.” He said “Good” and nodded approvingly. Because we think busy is good. We associate it with success, pulling our weight, being useful. 

But sometimes we forget the dark side of busy. I have worked in leadership and team development for years and have trained thousands of people. And most of them are busy. At a personal level, for most of us busy means bad sleep and bad nutrition, the stress of not having enough time to do things really well, and never having enough time to think. This is the busy of back ache, obesity and burnout. 

In work we are stuck in the rut of a way of working that is relentless and seems to be gathering pace. New technology overwhelms our prehistoric brains. It is possible to be in every loop, controlling every detail. This level of connection and control is seductive and toxic. It has laid a trap and we have fallen into it. It’s a busy that makes us less: less happy, less resilient, less productive.  

During the first Covid lockdown, over a few terrifying days I lost almost all my work.  No meetings, no long drives, no courses, no deadlines. I developed a routine that involved getting up later than usual, sitting in the sun and exercising. I went for walks and performed badly in a few online quizzes.  

I had the time and space to think. It was magical: possibly something that hadn’t happened since I was a child. After a couple of weeks, I felt relaxed and well. This set the conditions for creativity – I started to write.  Over the next few months I wrote a book about leadership and wrote the scripts for 30 videos about leadership.  

Covid gave me the time and space I would never have allowed myself – a break that made me more productive than if I had carried on. I needed that break, in order to create. I’d wanted to write for years, but lockdown gave me permission to stop and set the conditions for creativity. Being forced to pause led to the most productive and creative period in my working life. 

When you have the idea of pauses in mind, they are everywhere other than in work. In motorsport think how going into the pitstop means interrupting progress, seeming to fall behind the race, in order to come out stronger. And you see this concept in every form of art. The sculptor Charles Hadcock deliberately creates work that appears incomplete. This void, as he describes it, is actually engaging for the viewer. 

In music some would argue that the pauses are as important as the notes. Think how they are used: to give performers a rest to recover. To give the audience time to make sense of the performance. To change the pace and flow of the performance. You know that wonderful anticipation you feel in a pause in your favourite piece of music, when you know what’s coming next and you feel it in your whole body? That’s what a pause is for. 

We prefer noise and activity to silence – maybe that goes back to primeval times when the reassuring chatter and sound of the campfire told us we were safe. But it’s the wrong sort of chatter these days, and we need to switch it off. So we need to make sure that we pause to recover – to take a break between jobs, to stretch our legs, relax and maybe have healthy food and drink. 

We could shut the door and put music on, or go for a walk, or just work from an inspiring location. And we pause to think, clearing our heads of the detail and seeing what ideas and possibilities fill the void. Of course, to pause well we need time. There’s the old argument that there aren’t enough hours in the day. But maybe the hours are usually there, and we are just filling them with low-value activity.