Stop Being Busy Now!

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For years (over a decade if I am being honest) I have been busy and I am almost certain I am not the only one.

We have all experienced it, you ask someone how they are doing, or how their week was and it’s always the same “good but busy.”

How was your summer? Busy

How’s work? Busy

What happened to us? When did we all become so busy?

It seems like as a species we are really good at adding to our To-Do list and becoming busier and busier.

But guess what, there is a secret. We don’t need to be busy.

3 months ago I made one of the best decisions in my life.
I stopped being busy and it changed everything.

As a society we have normalized being busy, we have accepted it as a new state; you can be happy, sad, or angry, but most of us are now simply busy.

It makes a person start asking “why are we busy, what exactly are we doing that is making us so busy, are we actually getting anything meaningful done”?

After several months of contemplation and coming to terms with the fact that there must be a better way (but not knowing how to get there), I finally hit a tipping point.

I was watching a module of the Insane Productivity training course by Darren Hardy and he was describing an interesting relationship.

• The more successful a person is, the calmer and less busy they are.
• The less successful a person is the busier and more stressed they are.

When I heard this a light bulb went off, a real bright one.

The more money someone makes the less busy and stressed they are.

How you get from 0-1 is different than going from 1-2.

Getting a little bit of success is really about working hard and being noticed.

In the beginning, you don’t know what will work and you lack a lot of the skills needed to provide value to others. This means you need to work hard, try many different things, and build a ton of different skills.

But once you have those skills and the ideas of what works, there is a shift.

It is time to double down on what works and truly focus on the important items.

You need to say no to most things and yes to only the few most important.

I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do.

— Steve Jobs

So why are we all busy?

In my mind, we are all busy because we lack priority. Chances are you aren’t actually being forced to be so busy, you chose it. Mothers excluded, of course.

Now I’m sure you have all the reasons why you are busy.

• My boss just dumps work on my plate when I already have enough to last the rest of the week

• I need to get in my sports, hobbies, and socializing after work or I’m not as happy

• I need to do all the grocery shopping, cooking, and cleaning while working a full-time job

But here is the thing, those are all choices. I know, I know, that is not very helpful so here is what to do.

How to fix being busy

Step one: Accept that being busy is a choice, by saying you are busy you are playing the victim. Instead, simply change your words so you are empowered, “I’m getting to do so much these days, it’s great” or “I’ve been keeping my calendar really full”. This puts you in charge, instead of being the victim.

Step two: Prioritize and execute. Multitasking is a lie. You aren’t actually working on multiple things at once, instead, you are just switching back and forth between tasks (read Cal Newports Deep Work for more information on this). Instead of “trying” to multitask, focus on one thing at a time. This alone will make you feel so much less busy (and less stressed). I am 99% sure that not everything on your to-do list actually needs to get done. Ask yourself, if I don’t do this today does it really matter?

Step three: Work on the most important task, and do not worry so much about the rest. Imagine if you were having a heart attack and when you went to the hospital they tried to fix everything that was wrong instead of first helping you with the heart attack. Instead, they triage and assess what the most life-threatening injury you have is and focus on that. Think about that in your own daily task list. What is the one thing that you can work on that will make everything else easier, or no longer necessary to do. By developing the habit of only working on the most important task you can actually do less while having exponentially more impact.
Pro tip: sleeping instead of staying up late working on a project is almost always the correct answer.

Step four: Do not take on other people’s responsibilities. Throughout life, people will always try to push their priorities onto you. They try to offload their to-do list by increasing yours. Be aware of this and stand your ground, you get in life both what you ask for but also what you tolerate. If it’s your boss that is doing this, simply ask them what the priority is and how it compares to the other tasks already on your list.

Step five: Hell ya or no. As humans, we do this funny thing where we think that we will have time in the future for a project even though we do not have time right now. We will commit to something 3 months from today, expecting that our calendars won’t be just as full as they always are. Do not fall into this trap. When making commitments do it with the assumption that your calendar will be just as full 3 months from now as it is today. Remember when someone asks you to do something it’s either Hell ya or no.