Keeping Busy Promotes Stability in the Workplace

Do you to keep busy at work - all the time?

For many of us, keeping busy at work happens naturally. You show up, the work pours over you. Before you know it, the work day is done. Rinse and repeat.

Some of us may have to work at keeping busy. If you have a job where there are gaps throughout the day in the activity you're expected to pursue, you may not be busy all the time. An extreme example: an insurance salesman I knew shared space with an attorney and one other gent, all of whose work was more or less piecemeal. They spent a lot of time talking about the problems of the world throughout the work day. Since they were all sole proprietors who worked for themselves, I suppose it didn't matter that they weren't keeping busy all the time. 

On the other hand, if you work for someone else and you don't have plenty to do, what do you do? Look busy? Not particularly good for the business, to be sure; but it may be good for you. No one - especially bosses - wants to look like there's nothing to do. An even better approach, though, would be to seek and find useful things to do to contribute to the business. Rather than just look busy, get busy.

I've worked in shops where everyone buzzed around, busy as a bee. There was lots to do. I've also had the occasion to work in a shop or two where looking busy was part of the culture - whether you actually got anything done or not. 

I always preferred the former to the latter. That preference - and it's a strong one - may be something I inherited from my Dad. He was a blue collar guy. The last part of his working life found him working as what was called an assembler. He put together what at the time were complex cameras. One of these wound up on a trip to the moon. He got a pin from NASA acknowledging his part in making the camera. 

So he wasn't the most important (in the eyes of some) or rich guy in the world. But he took his work seriously and did a good job. 

We never had a lot of money. On a few occasions, though, Dad got home from work early. He punched out early. Why? He didn't have anything to do. And he couldn't stand looking like he was busy. Sure, the family got a few buck less to live on that week. But he just could stand being "a phony" (his phrase). You could argue it would benefit the family if he played along and looked busy. But, right or wrong, he couldn't be a phony. I respected that. And I think I picked up the habit of always keeping busy on the job however and whenever possible.

Thanks Dad.

Let's connect this with the Rule of St. Benedict and our ongoing theme of promoting stability in the workplace. You can imagine that a shop where everyone's busy - legitimately busy, actually doing productive things - would be a relatively stable workplace. Chances are you'd be right. 

The opposite would be true as well: If everyone's idle, there's a problem. Your shop likely isn't a stable place to work.

Assuming you work for a business that's doing OK, and you've got enough on your plate to keep you busy, you should be grateful. The alternative - being idle - isn't good. It's not only not good for the business, it's also not good for you. 

And, lo and behold, St Benedict has something to say about this in his Rule:

"Idleness is the enemy of the soul. The brethren, therefore, must be occupied at stated hours in manual labor, and again at other hours in sacred reading."

Since he's writing for monks in a monastery, the combination of manual labor and sacred reading makes perfect sense. The monastery required work to keep it going as a viable enterprise. Monks had to eat, they wore clothes, and needed adequate shelter - food, clothing, shelter. You know, the basics. But to make sure the basics were taken care of required work, especially manual labor. We've seen a host of entries in the Rule that addressed various types of work in a monastery. There was always something to do.

And, of course, the salvation of the individual monks' souls called for a disciplined spiritual life. Besides the regular praying of the Divine Office, monks were expected to read, to study. Their reading and study advanced their knowledge and understanding of spiritual matters. The purpose of this advancement was ultimately to grow closer to God. If all went according to plan, the monk's soul was seeded with good reading that resulted in an ever advancing degree of holiness.

At least that was the ideal.

We'll see next that St. Benedict not only tells his monks to keep busy, but follows this up with very specific instruction on exactly how to do that.

For now, we can look at our own work situations and determine a few things:

- Are we keeping busy throughout out work time, minimizing distractions?

- Is our activity sensible, meaning is any portion of it "busy work" - i.e., work that's performed to look like we're busy but doesn't really advance the goals and objectives of our business?

Just keeping busy for the sake of looking busy doesn't really help the business. And it likely isn't a healthy activity for either our mental or spiritual well-being.