The Hindu Business Line : Mastering the art of doing nothing

Hello again. All good at the office? Excellent! All my tidbits of advice helping you along in your careers? Wonderful? Thinking of getting that Octavia with your next bonus? Tasteful!

When I sit back and think about it, and by `it' I refer to all these `Sid Says' columns, I am often taken aback by the vast array of topics we have covered. Surely there must be little left to write about in the world of corporate going-ons. This thought has often occurred to me and I often fall back on a very important piece of advice I was given by an old writer friend: "Whenever you think you are running out of material go back to the basics. Read good books. Underline the good parts. And then publish them in your name."

This is not to say you have read any plagiarised material so far. Of course not! Every word you have read is new, original and unpublished before by any newspaper anywhere in Spain. Relax.

So this week things were looking a little bleak. Festivals numb the mind and the good old creative juices were no longer flowing. I decided to ring up an office-going friend of mine. Nothing like a little live inspiration.

Pastrami, one of my dearest friends, is an investment banker who is hugely successful and is rather popular with us freelancing types especially on the weekends. "Hello," he said, "You stuck with no work too?" I quickly brought him up to speed with my creative conundrum. "Can't help you at all Sid. Nothing happening in the office today. Boss on leave you know. I have absolutely nothing to do man. But need to look busy... "

My jaw dropped like a dotcom stock in 2002. How could I have not seen it? Of course! The fine art of zero productivity!

There is nothing as damning to a new manager's career as seeming to appear unoccupied and under-utilised. No matter if you've been working two weekends in a row. But the moment your boss sees you sitting around looking lost on a Tuesday morning you can bid that bonus farewell and line up with the rest of us outside Pastrami's in-house bar on weekends.

So readers, today we will focus on: `How to look busy without actually having to do anything more arduous than stapling or clearing spam'.

Now most young managers who read this column are looking to succeed in their careers, but without actually doing anything too tasking. But this is tougher than it looks. It requires planning, dedication and commitment. (This may seem ironic at first. But overall you need much, much less planning, dedication and commitment to look busy as against actually doing things at work).

First, the clever new manager needs to make sure he is in the right environment. This means being surrounded by a lot of printouts, books, files and papers. Other young managers are also good props. Don't sit alone at a clean desk. This conveys that you are a loner and that you have too much free time to clean your desk. (Some of you might say that a clean desk reflects an efficient and orderly employee. These are the exact types that make bosses feel jittery and either get transferred to the Andamans in months or are asked to handle things like SAP implementation, quality improvement, Six Sigma or Kaizen for the rest of their lives.)

Those guys down in `taxation and legal' read books with several thousands of pages of small print text and also produce massive mounds of printouts that normally take months to prepare, weeks to check and four minutes for the Board to ignore. Hardly anyone ever goes to meet them and they relish the occasional fresh human interaction. Ten minutes with them, and you will be walking back with a huge stack of documents that will quickly cover your tables, your cubicle walls and fill your laptop bag. Make sure you leave lots of tables full of numbers on your table top at all times. That just screams `future CFO'!

Now that the environment is ready, make sure you get a few phone calls every few hours. For this you will need to visit any shopping mall or popular weekend hangout and apply for several credit cards, loyalty programmes, loans and other services. Make sure you always give your office number to them. This way you will get a steady stream of phone calls for years. When the boss buzzes you can say, with some pride, that you are on the phone and will be there in ten minutes. Busy bee!

Great so far. Now you need to make sure that your boss is aware of how busy you are. For this you can use several tools. The first is the `packed to the gills' calendar. Here you print out a copy of your monthly calendar and paste it prominently next to your seat. Ensure you have marked out things to do against every day on the sheet including the occasional Sunday. Every time your boss asks you for a piece of work, scrutinise the calendar and think deeply. You can mark appointments as follows: (real meanings in parenthesis)

Renewed energy strategy (Change gas cylinder at home)

Disaster management review meeting (Take wife out for dinner to make up for forgetting anniversary)

Critical input consumption estimation (Buy groceries)

Diversification roadmap scoping (Check out new secretary on fourth floor)

Another method to seem busy is to periodically run around the office holding a piece of paper in your hand muttering to yourself: "This is crazy man. One man can't do this. What the hell... " Do this just before and after lunch for maximum effect. What the heck... do it during lunch too. A more cheeky way of doing this is to directly involve your boss in the deception. One ingenuous way is like this: First get a couple of days of leave sanctioned. Then, two days before you need to go on leave go back to your boss and cancel it. Tell him the work demanded it:

Boss: "So you are coming to work tomorrow and the day after?"

Sidin: "Yup. The replacement kidney can wait."

Boss: "Wow... "

So there. Those are the basics. You need to look, sound and talk busy. All very simple isn't it? Keep going at it and pretty soon you will have mastered the art of looking the part, but actually playing minesweeper all day.

Don't get caught though. Freelancing pays peanuts.

(The writer, an alumnus of IIM-A, was a management consultant before quitting to work on a book and a full-time writing career)

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