I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of being busy. I’m more tired of the social rewards we earn for being busy. If you’re busy and running at a frantic pace, the world seems to take notice.
In the workplace, busyness is like a badge of self-importance as we run around with our hair on fire rushing from meeting to meeting, deadline to deadline, etc. Many times, that busyness is rewarded as leaders mistake it for productivity and promote the “hard working” employees. At home, we believe that our busyness is accomplishing something meaningful as we rush our kids to extra-curricular activities (“to enrich them”) or busy ourselves with endless household duties (“to create a happy home”).
The thing about busyness is that it rarely offers us the rewards we want. We rush to earn more money. We rush to save time. We rush to fulfill all of our commitments. We rush, we rush, we rush and in the end we accomplish little of real importance or meaning. Sure, we can check things off our list, but are they even things we really care about?
In the last six months, I’ve been consumed with busyness. I’ve been exhausted, but I press on thinking, “I must just work harder.” But working harder, faster or longer isn’t always the answer and I realized that this weekend as I finished reading Timothy Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek. Ferriss offered a number of thought-provoking ideas that I’ll act on, but there were two questions that resonated with me most:
- Am I being productive or just active?
- If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied?
As I shift my focus away from increasing activity to increasing productivity and meaning, my perspective on my work-life has improved – dramatically. I no longer feel busy, but accomplished. I no longer feel pressured, but in control. I no longer feel frazzled, but calm. There’s a freedom in letting go of busyness that I hadn’t felt in a very long time. I see what is important, I prioritize it and then I act on it.
These two simple questions have created more time in my workweek than any other time management technique I’ve learned so far. In fact, there have been free moments this week when I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I did the unfathomable. I did nothing and I’ll tell ya…it really was something.
image credit: Tyler Olson:Fotolia.com
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I get frantic when I am too busy and then when I slow down, I am looking for things to fill in the downtime. How bizarre and crazy! This is a VICIOUS cycle. I need to work on this. Thanks for posting this.
I know what you mean Tanyetta! Downtime is like that awkward silence that sometimes occurs when you’re talking to someone – we want to fill it up. But I didn’t feel compelled to fill in my downtime this week because I was able to answer “Yes!” to both questions from Tim Ferriss’ book. Everything else could wait. Try it!
I agree with you completely. Too much focus is on being busy I almost want to change the name of my blog. I’m tired of it, I’ve spend a year driving my self crazy and what did I accomplish? I’ve been taking some time to think about how I run my life and after reading this and reading the article “The Test of Time: A busy working mother tries to figure out where all her time is going,” I’ve been trying re-evaluate my life. I talk abou it on my blog. Oh I love your Article By Plug In.
Ah yes, I was directed to that article (http://bit.ly/7GbQZP) after this post went up – interesting thoughts to ponder as I slow down long enough to realize that my frantic pace is getting me nowhere (or at least where I really want to be going!). Here’s to NOT being busy.
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