Be Productive, Not Busy
If we had to take an educated guess, we could approximate the three most frequent answers to the world’s most common question.
“How are you?”
- Good
- Not Bad
- Busy
And the three variations to the 3rd option are:
- Busy!
- So Busy!
- Crazy Busy!
And the three most common replies usually revolved around:
- Yep, me too
- You’re not the only one!
- That’s a good problem to have!
Here we are, celebrating, and congratulating eachother for having lost control of the most precious gift we are given: time. Of course, there is always more work to be done. People to see, places to go, lives to save, products to ship, customers to please. True, but if we take a step back, perhaps we’ll see that what we take on is largely self-imposed. Our own ambitions for drive and success can sometimes act to our detriment. If you have the slightest inclination to believe that you may be incline to busyness, now is a good time to reconsider a few priorities. Also, to question ourselves on logic we have somehow come to believe unquestionable: “A busy person gets more done”.
A busy mind is cluttered with noise, and solutions are harder to retrieve in the midst of a traffic jam. Busyness is not a necessary condition, it’s something we’ve chosen, sometimes only by acquiescence to it. At the end of the day, being busy causes much more harm then it gets stuff done. In the depths of busyness, it’s hard to stop, and ask, what exactly is getting done? Are we chasing field mice here, or antelope? Are we changing the game, or merely playing in defence?
This week, chose productivity, not busyness. When someone asks: “How are you?”, refuse to respond with anything “Busy”. Say “No” to demands of others more often than you would. Ironically, you might find that you will get a lot more done.