Are You Unnecessarily Busy?
Do you find it hard to find time for everything you would like to do? Do you sometimes say things like: “I should really do this”, and that’s as far as you go to complete it? Are you busy most of the time, juggling between work, chores, social commitments and whatever else fills your cluttered life?
If any of the things I described earlier seem familiar, then you probably have a case of something I call unnecessary busyness. I struggled with it too, for most of my life. The good news is, the solution is pretty simple, although not necessarily easy.
But before we get to the solution, let’s see how much busyness is costing you and let’s analyze what’s really causing it.
The Consequences of Busyness
I’m guessing that the things that keep you busy force you to cast aside other things in your life, even those that you consider more important. What’s the point of being busy all the time if you don’t actually stop to enjoy life?
I bet that there are a lot of fun things in your future you would like to do, but you usually reason with yourself that you don’t have time to do them right now. You say you’ll do them tomorrow, even though you said the same thing yesterday.
If you’re too busy, you’ll never improve and grow, you’ll never make positive changes to your life and that of others, you’ll never spend valuable time with your loved ones, you’ll never live a healthy lifestyle and you’ll never have time to do the things you really enjoy.
If you haven’t watched it, you may think of Click (a movie where the protagonist gets a TV remote that allows him to control his life), as another funny movie from Adam Sandler. In reality, it conveys a very strong message about how to live one’s life. As the movie progresses you quickly realize the remote control is just a metaphor of how the protagonist spends his days: he fast forwards through the “unimportant” moments (like setting aside time for his family) to get more quickly to the “important” moments (like getting a promotion).
At some point the remote starts fast forwarding on its own, since it memorizes previous patterns of the user’s behavior. One day, the character wakes up and realizes most of his life has passed by and he just wasn’t there to live it. In this clip, he is re-living the last moment he saw his father alive (notice that the remote control allowed the protagonist only to observe past moments, as in a movie, but not to change what had happened):
What the movie made me realize is that you don’t need a magical remote control to fast forward your life and miss all of its important moments, you just need to be constantly busy and the rest will sort itself out. I know I don’t want that for myself. Do you?
The Three Causes
During most of my college days and the fist years of my professional life, I was constantly busy. After a lot of failing and iterating, I have come to realize that there were three misconceptions in my way of thinking that were causing my busyness. Once you identify and understand these causes, it’s a lot easier to take action against them. I would summarize the three causes as follows:
- Inability to Set Time Aside
- Lack of Prioritization
- The Sexiness of Busyness
Let me explain each of these causes separately:
Inability to Set Time Aside
One misconception I used to have was that once I had everything I wanted to do written down, I would be organized enough to stop being busy all the time. The problem with this mindset is that it completely disregards the second part of the equation, which is to actually do the tasks. It’s a lot easier to write a task down than it is to complete it, because when you attempt to do it is when the complexities of reality appear.
I do think it’s important to have a system to remember all the things you have to do, but this is not enough, you also have to have a system to do those things. It sounds pretty obvious if you put it that way, but it’s a very strong reason for people’s pending tasks to accumulate infinitely.
I remember once having a huge list of books I wanted to read. I never actually set aside time in my busy life to read those books, so the list just piled up. I would sometimes start reading one of them for a while only to abandon it after other stuff appeared in my busy agenda.
Then, one day, what I started doing was actually setting aside some time in my busy schedule to read. At first, this was on the bus to work. The great thing about this was that I had to go to work anyway, so reading didn’t disrupt my daily life at all, it just added value. This immediately changed the way I read books. I moved from finishing zero books per year to my current rate of about six non-fiction books per year.
Although different tasks should be completed in different ways than in my example before, it’s important to have a system that helps you do those tasks, not just one that helps you remember them. Things don’t magically do themselves, so you must be honest with yourself about how much time it will take you to do them, and then you must set aside that time.
Lack of Prioritization
From the previous section one could argue that even if you have organization, when you try to set aside time to do all the things in your system you just won’t have enough time to do everything in it. While this is true, it shouldn’t upset you. This is the way I see it:
You can do anything you want, but you can’t do everything you want.
The reality is we all have the same time limitation on what we can do, we all have exactly 24 hours a day. And even if this is a quite simple limitation, it’s implications are seldom understood profoundly. It’s not that we don’t have time to do the things we should or want to be doing, the problem is simply that we choose to do less important things instead. We choose to work extra hours, we choose to watch TV, we choose to live far from our works and therefore spend a lot of time in traffic.
So the problem of scarcity of time is rarely seen for what it is. It’s ultimately a problem of prioritization. You probably don’t have time to do the things you want or should be doing because you prioritize less important things. With prioritization, it’s a lot easier to do only what matters in that 24 hour time frame you get everyday. It’s also easier to feel less guilty about not doing the stuff you give less priority to, which by definition don’t matter to you anyways.
The Sexiness of Busyness
Last but not least, the biggest flaw in our mentalities is simply how we perceive busyness. We usually see someone who is busy as a productive, hardworking person doing everything in their power to achieve their goals, but this couldn’t be farther from the truth: being busy in itself doesn’t make you more productive, doing things does.
As a society, we usually shun someone that’s lazy and wastes their time procrastinating. But wasting time while being busy can be equally harmful, although it might not feel that way. Let me give you an example.
Suppose you have two programmers (A and B) working to solve the same problem. Both of them start with the same insufficient knowledge on how to solve it, so they must explore different alternatives to get to the final solution.
Programmer A jumps headlong into writing code he thinks will work. After a while, he runs it, sees that it doesn’t solve the problem, writes some more code, and repeats this pattern for many iterations. At the end of the day, after 10 straight hours of hard work (he didn’t even go for lunch), he finally solves the problem.
Programmer B, on the other hand, decides to think things through. He spends most of the morning studying the issue. Then, during lunch, he remembers that one of his friends from college is really good at that kind of problems. After lunch, he calls his friend and receives some great insight on what he should do. He then proceeds to program his solution in 30 minutes, runs it, checks that it works and he’s done, after just 5 hours of work.
This example may seem a little far fetched, but in my experience as a professional programmer, you are either programmer A or programmer B, there’s no in between. I have been in both situations, and in either one the end result worked just the same.
It might seem to A (and to his supervisors) that he is more productive, since he works so hard, but the truth is that B achieved the same results in half the time. More importantly, A is incorporating to his life the bad habit of being busy, something that will be very difficult to shake off afterwards. Like Gandhi said:
“… Your actions become your habits, your habits become your values, your values become your destiny.”
Try to see busy for what it is: a harmful state that you should try to a avoid, instead of a cool state that people need to walk through in order to be successful. The truth is, people that are most satisfied with their lives find ways to avoid being busy, like delegating or discarding unimportant things. This allows them more time for things they hold dear, like being with their friends and families.
Things You Can Do
Like I said earlier, the process of not being busy is pretty simple, although not necessarily an easy, one. Now that we’ve analyzed what’s causing your busyness, here are four ways you can remove those causes.
Be Mindful of what You Do
As obvious as it seem, the first step of focusing on what matters most, is actually defining what’s important to you. Remember, you only have 24 hours a day, so failing to prioritize your life will probably result in you doing things that don’t matter instead of those that do.
You actually choose what to do with your time on a daily basis, even though you usually don’t realize it. My advice is to make this a more conscious choice: whenever you’re about to do something, anything, analyze if it is important and put yourself in the situation of not doing it. You’ll be surprised to realize how many things that you thought were important weren’t really that meaningful to you at all.
If you need help getting started, you can read the book Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life. It’s full of insight on how to define and focus on what matters most to you, and it delivers its message in a really concise way too.
Have a System
It’s easier to focus on what matters when you a have a system that helps you both decide what you should be doing and assign time to do those things. Whatever system you choose, your biggest concerns should be prioritization: being able to select what to do and what not to do, and time-boxing: being able to set aside time frames to work in specific things.
It’s important to understand that writing something down in a To-Do list doesn’t get it done, doing it does. So your system should reflect your ability to do things in the most honest way possible. This means that if you’re going to set aside time to do something, make sure it’s the right amount of time, not the time you should do it based on unrealistic expectations. It’s also important to keep your system as updated as possible: if something within it is no longer meaningful or valid, simply remove it.
There are many proven systems you can try. For a start, you could read the book To-Do List Makeover, it’s a very brief yet incisive description on how to completely revamp To-Do lists. It really helped me organize my life after years of struggling with different organizational techniques. Finding a good system is an iterative process, so be willing to experiment until you converge to what’s right for you.
Be More Willing to Let Go
We all have commitments in our life we deem significant, but it’s important to evaluate if they’re really adding value to us or if they’re simply dead weight holding us back from happiness. Once you recognize those that are a burden to you, be prepared to let them go.
It can either be a demeaning job, a toxic relationship, an unhealthy addiction, or even smaller and more subtle bad habits. Whatever it is, once you recognize it as a waste, work hard to eliminate it. This can be easy once you have your priorities right: just take away time from those things you don’t like doing and assign it to those you care about the most.
Learn to Say No
The world is constantly offering us things to do: publicity wants us to buy stuff, people invite us to their events and our employers want us to take up more work and greater responsibilities. Some of these things will result in great opportunities, but the vast majority will just be useless noise, specially in today’s ever connected world.
Essentially, every yes you say is time of your life you give away, and contrary to popular belief, time does not equal money. The truth is, your time is your most precious asset, since once it’s gone, you’ll never get it back.
So don’t be afraid to say no. This doesn’t mean being negative or rude, it just means saving your “yeses” to those things that are truly significant. This will allow you more commitment to those few things you say yes to. Remember that each “yes” you say has a cost: the cost of saying “no” to many other things, so use your “yeses” wisely.
Liberate Yourself from Busyness
To summarize, understanding the causes of your busyness will help you eliminate them more effectively, and finally focus on those important aspects of your life you’ve been putting aside: your health, your relationships, your passions, or anything else that’s meaningful to you.
It’s not the lack of time that’s keeping you form doing what you want, it’s failing to define the things that matter, not setting aside time to do them, and your misguided perception of busyness as a good thing. Always remember that busy is an option, you chose to be busy. Now it’s your time to chose the opposite for a change!
If you have other advise on how to fight busyness you can leave them as a comment below. Also, if you think this article was useful, please recommend it (by clicking in the ♥ below), share it or tweet it. Good luck!
