Seduced by Busyness?
Tags: Success, Business, Mindfulness, Organization, Productivity

Photo by Andreas Klassen on Unsplash

Picture a successful person. What do you see?

Perhaps it’s a woman in a power suit, hustling around the city. Maybe you see a top level athlete throwing weights around the gym. Your favorite celebrity on a red carpet.

Whoever you imagine, they’re probably actively busy.

When someone wants to build a business, get the grade, or finish the race, the to-do list fills up fast. Sure, there are so many things one could do. Plus, according to pop culture, the successful are always hustling. Sleeping in is not glorifying, daydreaming isn’t exactly sexy.

The origin of the busyness habit

I grew up in the United States public school system. Here, we often used the phrase “busy work” when it came to certain classes. Remember substitute teacher days? a movie along with a questionnaire filled our day of school. Half days were another excuse to pull out worksheets that never got graded. Often times, students were awarded extra credit for completing their crossword the fastest.

Obviously school cannot cancel because the lesson plan is not 100% productive, and teaching children to focus and do the tedious stuff is an important skill. However, in those moments we learned how seductive busyness is. Pretty quickly, kids learn that looking busy reaps rewards. They understand their time is not valued. Instead, their ability to fill eight hours a day with tasks gets them the grade. Seemed harmless at the time, but those lessons lasted.

Fast forward to adulthood, and productive distractions enter the scene. I can spend all day making my house sparkling clean, deleting spam emails, or even writing a list of things to check off the next day. Even if my most important goal didn’t get done, I’ll end my day saying “well, at least I did all that other stuff!”. I kept myself busy, didn’t “waste time”, and that’s what matters, right?

Why it’s ruining your life

Busyness looks good. It’s nice to tell friends all of the checked off items. It’s great to have a visual representation of the day for family to see, like a clean space and a full pantry of groceries. What’s the problem?

Sit down, close your eyes, and imagine your ideal life next year.

What would it take to get there?

That to-do list is much harder. Applying for a new job, launching a website, announcing intentions to friends and family, making a big financial investment. These chores are hard and emotionally tasking. They attack your ego, because what if it doesn’t pan out? The alternative to busy work is hard work. If burnout occurs from the constant busyness, how can the hard stuff get done? Plus, after spending an hour working on an emotionally draining task, some “unproductive” time is required for recovery.

How to fix it

Here are a few tools I’ve collected for refocusing my mind to productivity over busyness.

Make lists.

Be careful here, some lists turn into busy work really quickly! Make two lists: Hard Work and Busy Work. Hard work are tasks that keep getting put off, or maybe they get done but take an emotional toll. The busy work list will include items that need to get done but are mindless (cleaning, making other lists, working in the garden, watching your favorite reality tv show, etc) and it’ll host items that could be eliminated all together. Evaluate both lists, and cross off or outsource what you can. Think of each removed item as time, and think of time as currency. When a task gets removed, additional time is paid out.

2. Add reflection to the hard work list.

Remember, busyness is seductive. Reflection, not so much. That doesn’t make it less important. Taking time to reflect on why certain tasks are valued over others is really hard! Reflect on the big goals in life, and decide why they are goals and how they’ll get done daily.

3. Wake up early.

Early morning hours are perfect for productivity. Popping out of bed before anyone else in the house is a hard task, not a busy one. The feeling of accomplishment is sometimes enough encouragement to start checking items off the hard list. Jump-starting the day with something challenging is such a wonderful gift to oneself.

Alternatively, some of the required busy work could slide into the early morning time slot. Be careful here though; an hour of busy work can easily turn into three. Set a timer and get the work done before the alarm sounds.

4. Shift the mentality.

It won’t feel natural to cross one item off a list when in the same amount of time, four busywork tasks could get done. Learn to value the hard work over staying busy. This is challenging, and may require a bit of gamifying. Try assigning points to tasks based on the mental effort required. Folding laundry might be one point, while posting the first YouTube video might be five. Aim for a certain number of points each day rather than tasks.

The daily reflection time will help with this mindset shift, too.

You know what to do

Awareness is the first step. The thought of “I’m so busy!” has new meaning now. Is it productive/busy or distractive/busy? Start checking in, and stop letting busyness seduce you.