Being busy is either our procrastination strategy or else our inability to organize our lives well. Busy people are perceived as important. They even feel they’re important. But, being busy isn’t to be productive. A 100% workload leaves us with no time to take on new important tasks.
People who were asked to calculate their hourly wage before listening to a short piece of music, were more impatient while the music was playing.[1] They wanted to do something more profitable. The widening gap nowadays between can-do and doing is also busyness driving.
Tim Ferriss wrote that the options are almost limitless for creating busyness.[2] Why not commit yourself to produce quantities of documents? Or else you can make sure you have key roles in all ongoing projects. Above all, be a link in as many chain of commands as possible.
The busyness fills our calendar with meetings and other hardscapes. Thus, we can never deliver what we committed to at those meetings. It’ll overload our cognitive capacity. Fight-or-flight mode will crowd out our analytical proficiency. Priorities become inflexible.
Idleness is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. You’ll see the wholeness and make unexpected connections.[3] And replacing unpredictable deadlines with timeboxing makes you more adaptable to change. A good start is to never use the word busy as an answer.
[1] DeVoe S. E., House J. – Time, money, and happiness: How does putting a price on time affect our ability to smell the roses?, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 48, Issue 2, March 2012.
[2] Ferriss T. – The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich, Random House, 2007.
[3] Kreider T. – We Learn Nothing: Essays and Cartoons, Simon and Schuster, 2012.
