To Be Your Best Self, Be Less Busy

How being overbooked and overstimulated can keep us from recognizing what we truly want.

Post by Dani Kreeft, the one woman force behind paper goods brand Dani Press, currently based in Toronto, Canada. If she isn’t scrambling to ship greeting cards and art prints across North America, she’s probably wandering around with her camera foraging for a coffee.

Our allergy to simplicity stems out of that whole YOLO/FOMO business. If it’s simple, it means we’ve pared it down and eliminated options, and that’s just not what we do anymore. To not only whittle our values, our wardrobes and our diets, but to be okay with it is basically swimming upstream nowadays. We’d rather take a chance, gambling our days away feeling frantic and over-scheduled and stretched out like a too-thin canvas.

There’s something about feeling busy that reassures and encourages our desire to keep up with everyone else. With all the streetlights on in our mind all the time, we’re going places, we’re doing things, we’re in control, in charge. This is the life! This is the dream!

But then we’re exhausted, standing there at the bus stop checking our phones, wondering why.

It’s because all those flickering streetlights lack focus.

Stuffing your schedule, hitting YES to every Facebook invite, signing up for short-lived memberships to climbing gyms. These things splay your concentration in too many directions. It might satiate your ever-shortening attention span, but it’s the enemy of focus.

“It is not a daily increase, but a daily decrease. Hack away at the inessentials.” — Bruce Lee

Why does this matter?

A loyalty to too many things can divide your vision and blur your focus. A lack of focus in daily life naturally bleeds into a lack of vision in the bigger picture. When you dismantle the bigger scale into its individual parts — the years, the months, the days — you’ll find that the future is made up of, at its smallest scale, today. And if today is a big pile of panic buttons and scribbled to-do lists, there’s no reason to believe the future is going to look any different.

So the next time someone on a bandwagon uses “YOLO!” as the reasoning to drop what you’re doing, ask yourself if it’s part of your long term vision. If it isn’t, it shouldn’t be part of your short-term focus.

Post originally shared on Holstee’s online magazine, Mindful Matter.