Stop Using Busy as an Excuse
We all have a number of things that we have to do — for ourselves, for our families, for work, and for our communities. For many of us, juggling all of these things can keep us going all day long, never quite getting to the point where we are able to cross all the to-do items that we had off our list. As a result, we are tired, frazzled, and wondering when we might catch a break. Sound familiar?
Our lives continue to get busier and busier, with more competing priorities and as a result, more demands on our time. Or are we telling ourselves a big fat lie? Maybe we aren’t as busy as we say or think we are. Maybe we’re using busy as an excuse.
I started pondering this question while standing in line to check out. I had a number of errands to run and a time commitment that I needed to get to. As I stood in line, two women ahead of me were catching up with one another about their lives and how unbelievably busy they were. As I had forgotten my earbuds at home and was stuck in line, I shamelessly listened in. During the course of the discussion, they caught up on their respective jobs, their recent road trips, what they’d seen about mutual friends on social media and the trending TV shows they were both watching. The conversation wrapped with the lament of “We’ve been so busy that we haven’t been able to catch up. Let’s make time!”
I thought nothing of the conversation until it happened again, this time a mixed group of people ahead of us while we waiting for our burrito orders to come up. Then it happened again while picking up a pharmacy order.
Time and time again, I was hearing from people the same lament — I am so busy and there just isn’t time. Are we really as busy as we think or feel we are or is there something else going on?
In all of these stories, there existed common themes:
- Numerous job commitments and meetings
- Social Media
- News stories
- Watching TV and movies
- Running errands
- Preparing, cooking and cleaning up from meals
- Family commitments
- Feeling overwhelmed
I decided to do a little digging to see how much time people really do spend on these activities. The results were a bit staggering.
Per day, we spend 144 minutes on social media, and in 2020, we increased this number significantly while we were all stuck in some form of restricted activity. We spend typically 2.5 hours a day watching TV, increasing this number to 3.36 hours on the weekends. Just our consumption of news, social media, and TV comes to a whopping five hours. Most of us work 8–10 hours a day and of that, we spend 3–4 hours in meetings at work. At home, we are spending about an hour a day on housework and household management tasks. You can see a breakdown of the U.S. averages here.
Obviously, if we are spending that much time watching TV and engaging in social media, busy isn’t the problem. Being busy isn’t a bad thing IF you are being busy that the things that you value and that you want to achieve. So why do we keep saying we are busy? Is it a badge of honor? Something that makes us feel valued? Something we need validation for? Or is it really us trying to tell ourselves that we need to step back and take care of ourselves?
For many of us, when we feel busy the reaction is that we need to get better organized so that we can become more productive so that we can have more time for the other things we need to do. That strategy, however, can only work up to a certain point.
We just don’t have the ability to go non-stop without paying the price. We need to recognize that when we say we are busy, we might actually be saying that we need to take some time for ourselves. We need to recognize that we are human who need to be and not just do. We don’t have the ability to always be “on” and we can’t add more hours into the day.
Next time I hear myself saying I am busy, I am going to stop using it as an excuse to avoid doing what I really need to do — step back and make a point of focusing on practicing some self-care so that I can re-charge and curtail the feeling of being exhausted and overwhelmed.
