At work, busy-ness is my business

As I was preparing to leave work last Friday, wrapping things up a little later than expected, I thought to myself, "Wow, what a busy week."

That thought kicked around my brain for a minute, and then it was replaced by another: "Cool! What a busy week!"

The second reaction may seem strange — most people wouldn't equate "busy" with "cool."

I must confess that I like the occasional — or, even better, the frequent — lazy day at home with nothing to do but relax on the couch, read a book and watch some football on TV. There's nothing better when you need to recharge your batteries and let your brain rest a bit.

But when it comes to my job, I prefer to be busy. In fact, I'd rather have an office to-do list that seems impossibly long than one that's a few items too short.

I didn't realize how important this was to my work psyche until I made my recent career change because the possibility of not being busy never arose during my years at the Deseret News.

When I started at the paper back in 1998, I was a business reporter, and I always had plenty of stories to do. As I moved into various editorial positions, I was often swamped with not only the "nuts and bolts" tasks of editing, but also the challenges of managing teams of employees. Then, during my time as managing editor of deseretnews.com, I was learning a whole new set of skills while continuing to serve as a manager.

Whatever the role, I was always busy, and there was far more work to do each day than I could reasonably expect to get done.

That all changed when I started my new job.

For the first few weeks in the new gig, I was learning about the people, procedures and politics of my workplace. Many of those days were mentally exhausting, but I often went home feeling like I had not accomplished much actual work during my hours in the office.

In fact, back in September, I wrote in this column about my attempts to have patience with myself. It was frustrating to me that I didn't know how to do everything on my first day in the new job, and I was feeling less than useful.

But I noticed a couple of weeks ago that I had reached a turning point in that regard. All of a sudden, my days were full of substantive work. Even when I thought I was going to have a slow day, I found such was not the case.