Developing Capacity

The Student Affairs Collective hosted another great #sachat on Thursday, April 24. The topic was "the glorification of busy." Every week I am amazed at the turnout of student affairs professionals on this chat venue and I struggle to keep up with the conversation - we make Twitter move rapidly!

Being busy as a professional is a tricky thing. What is busy? How do you define what you mean by busy? This is probably an unfair question in April. Most of us in student affairs are in one of our busiest times - staff selection, student organization turnover, professional staff hiring, room selection, etc. We are hypersensitive to our schedules right now so the timing of the chat was perfect.

I struggle with "busy" often. I choose to allocate time to work and time to life how I see fit. Not everyone agrees with the way I do it and I don't always agree with the way others do it. But I own my own definition of busy and try not to talk too much about it. The idea of "busy" is tied closely to our perceived self-worth and our need to validate our competence as professionals. We get competitive and we try to "one up" one another by comparing schedules and number of hours spent at work. It's unfair and it's unhealthy. Stacy Oliver wrote a great blog post about this very topic about a year ago and I reflect on it often when rationalizing the amount of work I think I have to do or that I see others do.

I hate the phrase "I don't have time." We do have time. We always have time and, in fact, we all have the same amount of time in a day and in a week that our colleagues do. It's a matter of how we want to use the time and asking ourselves about the importance of how we have chosen to use our time. If your answer to a request is "I don't have time," then you need to either re-prioritize your time or just be authentic with your answer and tell us why you don't want to do it or that don't have the ability (yet) to get something done. Honesty works - covering up the truth with "I don't have time" doesn't work.

There's a big difference between one's ability to WORK HARD and the CAPACITY one has to accomplish many things. We all know people who work constantly but never seem to accomplish much - and the inefficiency is often mistaken for hard work. The act of always saying we are too busy is a mask for our own self-consciousness about our lack of capacity. 

We need to think critically about how we help new professionals develop capacity. We need to stop rewarding those who might work longer hours and stop judging those who try to find that elusive balance we hear so much about. Capacity is the ability to take on responsibility and fill up our bucket. Some people have bigger buckets than others, but we can help each other understand the volume and pace of work that we are all capable of handling. Some of it's innate, some of it is learned. But instead of focusing on competition, we should focus on helping others grow their capacity to do more and to do it better.

I welcome your thoughts on how we can work to help others develop capacity. Is it innate? Is it learned? Share your thoughts here or find me on Twitter @pottscharlie