Ever get an animal in your house? Not a dog, a cat, or a hamster, but a wild animal: a bird that flew in and started frantically flapping around; a squirrel that invaded the fireplace. Growing up in North Carolina, we’d occasionally even find a snake in the living room, and a neighbor would come remove it with a rake and a bucket. Whatever the animal is, the experience is chaotic and fairly alarming.

During the intense days of the pandemic, leaders let some animals into the house. While we innovated in real time and found new ways to connect and be productive under unimaginable constraints, we also made space for some pretty feral ways of working. We tolerated and encouraged working practices that, in the morning light of the post-COVID era, don’t look terribly effective, civil, or logical … or all the above.

Let’s look at these animals and explore how to get them out of your (working) house.

The Busy Bee

Whenever someone at work tells me they’re busy, I have a reflexive response: “Busy is good!” To a certain extent, it’s true. A healthy business of any kind generates a ton of activity. That said, during the COVID-19 era, we took the decades-long trend toward work intensification to the next level.

What is work intensification? It’s the most dangerous work trend you’ve never heard of. When I was conducting research for my book, Work Here Now, I was fascinated to learn that academics had been studying and quantifying the creeping feeling that work has become more extreme in nature during our lifetimes. That feeling reflects the quantified reality of work intensification: We are, today, asked to do more units of work per unit of time than we were previously. Agricultural workers are asked to pick more fruit in an hour; knowledge workers are asked to be in more meetings per day.

Work intensification got worse during the COVID-19 era because we were all keen to look busy: “I’m not sitting at home messing around with sourdough starter and macrame projects! I’m working constantly!” We scheduled more catch-ups, sent more emails, started more chats … all to keep that little light on our computers red (I’m working) and not green (I’m free) or, even worse, yellow (I’ve — heavens to Betsy — stepped away from the keyboard).

As our lives have shifted again in recent years, all that busyness has become genuinely unsustainable. Add back in an array of real-world activities — everything from coming into the office to attending kids’ soccer games — and we’re running out of hours to do all the things. Critical work priorities are lost in a soup of “too much.” You may feel as overwhelmed today at work as you did in 2020 — and research suggests that we are even more burned out than we were during the pandemic.

So how do we get the busy bee out of our working house? Here are a couple of strategies:

Swat your inner busy bee: Apply ruthless, constant prioritization. My apartment door has a legally mandated fire safety guide on it with two scenarios: “The fire is in your apartment” and “The fire is not in your apartment.” One way to fight oppressive busyness is to understand when the fire is in your apartment and when it is not. All tasks and initiatives are not equally important, despite an electronic environment (the email inbox or chat window) that can make them look similar. Setting crisp priorities helps you be less busy and more frequently enter a beneficial flow state (as noted by the research of Cal Newport and others).

Protect your team from stingers: Change the conversation. Your company may have challenging cultural elements around needing to appear busy, and that’s hard to unilaterally shift. But — whether you’re a manager or not — you can influence how your own team talks about, experiences, and handles work intensity. Simply put: Stop talking about how busy you are. Start talking about what you’re achieving. Conversations about results have a nice way of going viral, and you create space for others to focus on impact, not activity.

* * *

Work shouldn’t be where the wild things are.