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Are you a burster?

July 31st, 2007

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From Busyness vs. Burst: Why Corporate Web Workers Look Unproductive:

There’s a culture clash inside office buildings where workers from the busyness economy sit in cubicles next to workers from the burst economy… web workers. Even if you work as a corporate employee in an office building, you may still be a web worker, using the Web for radical and unconventional productivity. If you are, your coworkers who don’t get how the Web changes work may think you’re a malingerer, given your incessant online connecting and surfing combined with your lack of attention to the old rules of work.

This article was an excellent find for me. It illustrated a lot of points that I had struggled to clarify for myself over the past few years, especially when I worked in environments that valued busyness far more than bursting.

If you hadn’t figured out by now, I am definitely a burster. I have been for a long time. In the past it’s caused some friction with those who adhered to busyness. Bursting works well in environments that foster innovation and care about nurturing creativity among all personality types.

[tags]bursting, web workers, productivity[/tags]

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  • Baxter
    Busyness tends to annoy me, and I tend to think the people who promote it are a little stupid.

    They don't seem to understand that it's patently obvious they're just making themselves look busy. Maybe it's stretching a small task into a week's work, or fussing over some pointless little thing incessantly, but it's obvious, and it's annoying. There's some sort of combination of Eddie Haskell apple-polishing and drone bee brainless activity that just gets under my skin.

    I think if someone is really doing their job well, there should be long periods in which they really don't appear to be doing much at all, and those are typically punctuated by amazing flurries of activity where A LOT happens, very quickly, in a way the busy worker typically would never be prepared for.

    I used to be a reporter, and much of the day was spent twiddling thumbs. Maybe I was waiting on phone calls, maybe I was thinking up a lead, who knows, but no visible work was getting done. Once I sat down to type, I could knock out 15 inches of pretty decent copy in less than half an hour.
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