“Too Busy” is Just a Lazy Euphemism for “Not Important”

I get asked to join a lot of projects.

And I do mean a lot.

My inbox is full of cold pitches from former colleagues, friends-of-friends, acquaintances, and total strangers. As far as I can tell, I’m everybody’s go-to choice for when their moron uncle comes up with a brilliant billion dollar idea.

My response used to be a polite, but curt, “I’m too busy right now.”

It was an easy way to shut down the conversation without having to break the bad news, “Your idea just isn’t very good.”

I can usually list a thousand reasons why your idea isn’t very good:

• It’s been done to death.
• You bring nothing to the table.
• You have no network.
• Nobody has ever asked for a WiFi-Enabled SmartScissor™.

It might only take me 5–10 minutes to determine and enumerate the myriad unique flaws of your uniquely bad idea, but by the time we’ve coordinated a time to talk, I’ve thoroughly crushed your dreams, and wiped away your tears, I could have been doing 5 other, more important things.

Which brings me to my point, the 24 hours of each day is not some vacuum in which we sparsely populate activities — we are always doing something.

Every single minute of every single day is spent doing something, and that specific something is given priority over every alternative something that you could have otherwise been doing.

Economists call this concept opportunity cost and it’s a great lens for examining how you spend your time. When you choose to spend your time doing something in particular, it is done at the cost of something else. It is given priority.

Even sleep is an investment in your mental and physical health.

I have stopped using the phrase “too busy,” as it implies an ideal vacuum that’s not yet full, and I now practice what I call the Radically Intentional Prioritization Framework (RIPF).

I block my day into 85-minute periods of focus, using 16 alarms at 90 minute intervals throughout the day on my smartphone, and before each focus period begins, I spend 5 minutes reflecting on all the alternative ways I could be spending that period.

If, during this 5 minutes, I cannot convince myself that my planned activity is the absolute highest priority, I will shift focus and work on something more important.

You can use whatever intervals work for you, but in my experience, longer intervals work best; the important thing is consistency and commitment.

It’s very important to spend the full reflection time considering alternatives. It takes a lot of practice to shake the inertia of work and the shorthand of just continuing along the same path, but the reflection time is an investment well worth the 5.5% of your day it costs.

I even do this while sleeping (90 minutes is a good interval to achieve a full sleep cycle), and will typically use this reflection time to stay hydrated, and make a conscious decision to continue sleeping.

While I typically require 6 cycles (9 hours) for optimal performance, if I am excited about a project, I can cut it short, which helps me maximize the use of my time on what’s really important.

Time is our most finite resource, and spending even a single minute without a clear intention is worthless. By recognizing that there are no unspent moments during our brief period of life, we can optimize the way we spend our time for achieving our highest goals.