Can “banning busy” help us see the wood for the trees?
A couple of years ago, I, like many of us, had got to the point where any time someone asked how I was, my default answer was “busy”. Without thinking hard about it (that would be another thing to add to my to do list), or explaining why I was quite so occupied, that was my answer, every time. There was no adverb I could put in front of “busy” that was too extreme for me at that time — crazy, super, insanely — all forms of superlative madness were applicable.
We wear our busy-ness like a badge of honour, often without thinking whether it’s good for business. Or, more importantly, good for us. Like most insanely crazy mad super busy people do, I reached a busy-ness peak — terminal busy-ness. Unimaginably clichéd though it is, I had to leave an exercise class in tears (yep, the archetypal late-twenties broken business women, a nervous bundle of hot tears and sweaty overpriced neon gym wear) because I felt, quite literally, like I had absolutely no energy left in me. Thankfully I didn’t get as far as needing external help (other than that of my long-suffering friends, family and boyfriend), but in that moment I realised that this was, quite plainly, not a good way to live.
Fast forward two years and I have found some better sort of balance. I’m not a zen meditative master, nor am I stress-proof, nor are my diary or inbox best-in-class specimens — far from it. But, these days, I get on with and enjoy my work, push myself, but know when to stop. And just recently I’ve started to try something that many smarter people before me have recommended — I’m trying — trying — to ban “busy”.
One thing I know now, is that when the single defining feature of your week is that it’s been busy, you need to take a look at what the hell you really did with those seven days and whether there wasn’t something slightly more interesting about it. It’s one thing us all telling enquiring clients or bosses that we’re “insanely busy” to indicate we’re seriously in-demand humans, but is it really the best adjective I could use to describe the most recent seven days of my life to my parents, every time they phone on a Sunday evening? I think I probably owe them a little more than that.
Let’s talk about “nice” for a minute. Remember that word? Remember when you were nine and your teacher banned you writing “nice” when writing short essays about your weekend or your family or your pets or the Roman Empire (for good reason in that last instance)? Mrs Liddiard (or equivalent) banned it because it ceased to mean anything. It might be a relative value — a nice cup of tea compared to one that’s been left in the pot for ages or with a crappy tea bag. But it tells you very little about a person or a place or an experience or an animal or an historical epoch.
The same is surely true of “busy” these days. Everyone claims busy-ness, and no surprise: it’s the hygiene factor that proves you’re in gainful employment, you have people to see and places to go and your company isn’t about to go under from sheer absence of business. Busy keeps us going, it gives us purpose, stuff to entertain our brains with, and we should hope that in that sense we can all stay busy as long as possible.
But it can’t be everything. Two years ago, when I was running around putting multiple hyperbolic adjectives in front of the word “busy” and blurting that out as my first answer to anyone who would listen, it was because the busy-ness — the spiralling feeling of having a never-ending, insurmountable list of things to do, and little passion or motivation for those specific things themselves — had started to become everything. And it didn’t feel good.
It’s when your week in review in your mind’s eye looks like a blur of rushing, like one of those time lapse shots of Time Square with you in the middle, open mouthed; it’s when you remember the panic of getting from one meeting to another more than the meetings themselves; when you can’t shake the spiky, prickly anxiety of realising you haven’t done something you said you would; it’s a little lead weight in the bottom of your stomach that never quite goes away. It’s the desperate desire to buy a coffee and cling claw-like to the cardboard cup until it’s socially acceptable to buy another one because, yes, coffee tastes great and, yes, it makes you feel like you’re keeping up to speed with the insane rate at which things are moving around you. When it feels like that, it’s time to take a deep breath, take a day off, and take a look at what you can do to start enjoying the individual moments in your day — or at the very least being able to identify them. Maybe yesterday you had two really difficult meetings and then a long phone call that wasn’t really necessary, and it was annoying. I’m finding that even being able to look back on my day like that is helping me to feel calmer — taking stock, thinking about what was good and bad, and then putting it in a box and reading a book or meeting with friends and then getting a half-decent night’s sleep.
It’s early days. I’ve banned busy for two weeks now and have already racked my brains multiple times to come up with new synonymous adjectives — hectic, crazy, all over the place. I’m going to try to phase those out, and see what happens. It won’t empty my diary or my inbox, but it might give me a little more perspective about what I actually do with my time.
And crucially, the next time my parents call and ask how I am, I’m going to try so hard not to say “busy”. I’m going to say what I’ve actually done, what I’ve learnt, what I found interesting that I saw or listened to. Busy might be the rhythm of our fast-paced lives, but it shouldn’t be the chorus.
