There is a difference between having a lot to do and being busy. And there is an even bigger difference between being busy and getting things done, i.e. being effective. When asked “How are you?,” how often do many of us respond, “Busy, so busy!” with a bedraggled, hassled air?
Our culture has made ‘being busy’ one of the highest valued currencies in our social market. Tweet This Quote
Our culture and our ever-connected, high-speed times have made ‘being busy’ one of the highest valued currencies in our social market. We use it to pad our egos. Saying “I’m busy” is a proxy for saying “I’m important” or “I’m a valuable person” or “I’m living a full, engaged life.”
Being busy, or even just seeming so, is considered a valid excuse for almost any of life’s demands. It’s considered a justification for not actually listening, not speaking genuinely, being late, being inconsiderate, and, perhaps most ironically, for not actually getting much done.
Being busy is an excuse to ourselves and others for not doing the important things, the scary things, the difficult things. Busy is the new lazy.
Being busy is an excuse. Busy is the new lazy. Tweet This Quote
We are too busy (or lazy or intimidated) to prioritize, so we may never be getting anything important done. Tweet This Quote
There are plenty of reasons why so many of us feel so busy all the time, though. We don’t get a lot of support to breathe some space into our busyness and find a more effective approach. Some of the main culprits that get in the way are interruption, distraction, lack of clear priorities, and attachment to the idea of being busy. Interruption and distraction run so rampant that apparently the average IT worker is interrupted on the job as often as once every 3 minutes—up to 20 times an hour.
The same study shows that three-fourths of all interruptions are handled immediately, whether they need to be or not. We are on a roll, filling every last moment with tasks, regardless of whether those tasks get us closer to our bigger goals. We are too busy (or lazy or intimidated) to prioritize, so we may never be getting anything important done. We are too busy to be effective.
Being effective means being deliberate, and in order to be deliberate, we have to pause. Tweet This Quote
But there is a trick; it’s simultaneously the simplest and the most difficult hack there is: pausing our busy lives. Being effective means being deliberate, and in order to be deliberate, we have to pause. We have to create a gap in the steady stream; we have to create openings for space to integrate and infiltrate our lives. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, the more we look up, go for a walk, and find other ways to create space in our hectic schedules and cluttered minds, the more we can accomplish. For example, brain-science is now showing that the more we try to multi-task, the less productive we are.
There are lots of tools in the box for breathing this kind of accomplishing space into our lives. In our organizations, we can support effectiveness by baking that space into our company cultures and systems.
The more deliberate we are about how we spend our time and energy, the less likely we will get bogged down in trivial tasks, and the more likely we will build successful, meaningful businesses and live accomplishing, engaged lives. The lineage of Zen meditators seem to have figured it out a while ago:
This originally appeared on DOJO4’s blog and was used as material during a workshop at the B Corp Leadership Development Event.