The business of 'Busy-ness'

So how often have you had a conversation with a friend, colleague or family member in the last week where either of you have NOT used the B#$Y word to describe your general state of life? A large proportion of our conversations, exchanges and even facebook posts hover around the busy-ness syndrome in our lives.

A typical conversation with friends/colleagues often goes like this:

You: Hi, how are you?

Friend: been so busy, got so much going on …..

You: I know same here, just been swamped …. have no time

Sounds familiar??

I was a victim of this busy-ness epidemic. Until I had a forced sabbatical, I hadn’t ever given thought to how much we love glorifying our oh-so-busy lives. Popular media further reinforces this busy-ness syndrome. I recently saw an advertisement on TV for Vicks which centred around the theme of 'because mums can’t take sick days'. The fact is that our busy-ness is quite literally making us sick.

And yes I understand that life is busy.

Over the last few years I have been a stay at home parent, a working parent, a part time working parent. I know the constant demands that are put on all of us. We all have jobs to keep and families to look after. We have other commitments-community, social, sporting that we want to honour.

The questions I asked myself was:

How 'present' am I in all my different roles and in each moment?

Why am I 'drowning' in a self-induced time scarce void to give myself a false sense of identity and self-worth?

Busy-ness as a symbol of our self -worth and self-esteem: I hadn’t given much thought to how much this ‘busy-ness’ syndrome met my self-esteem needs. Recently, my family moved to Melbourne. I made the decision to take a sabbatical to settle us into our new life. As I reached out to meet people and make new friends, what struck me was that I felt part-embarrassed and part-guilty admitting that I had free time!! In conversations with people, I was no longer able to connect with the common malaise of “Oh I am so busy”.

My constant sense of being busy gave me a sense of feeling needed. I felt like I was doing something and in some very delusional way contributing. I was actually uncomfortable with having this quiet space and time available to me. This precious time that in my ‘old life’ would have felt like nirvana. However, here I was, feeling stressed about my free time and judging myself for not doing things that were more meaningful.

"Busy is a drug that a lot of people are addicted to" -Rob Bell

How we spend our time, reflects our values and priorities: What we fill our time with unconsciously reflects our personal values and priorities. Tasks that don’t feel right or we struggle to motivate ourselves to do, are the ones that have a low alignment to our values. Dr John Demartini talks about human values as what we truly hold important and what our life demonstrates is important . Our real values are defined as the things that we do with our time, what we choose to spend money on and what occupies our thoughts. Taking a sabbatical honoured my real value of 'family'. However, it was in conflict with my value of 'achievement'.

Harry Triandis, a social psychologist at the University of Illinois highlights that Individualistic cultures, which emphasise achievement over affiliation, helped cultivate this ‘time-is-money’ mindset. This creates an urgency to make every moment count.

I was simply wanting my time to count in more tangible terms. I was however overlooking all the things I was actually achieving. I was refocusing on my value of ‘health’ by doing yoga and meditation. I was contributing to my family’s emotional wellbeing and spending time at my son’s school doing mindfulness classes with 4 year olds. My 'achievement' value was given a boost by using the white space to visualise what I would love to create for my coaching business. The moment, I connected these ‘tasks’ with my value of 'achievement' and how I was 'making a difference' to myself and my family, I suddenly felt more worthy and these activities had more meaning.

From multi-tasking to mindful tasking. I recently read a blog post by Katherine Shafler that talked about how waking up each morning with the toxic 'I don’t have enough time’ thought fed into our lack mindset. It wires our brain into a poverty mindset where we don’t have enough of anything (time, sleep, money and resources). In her blog, she states, “When our default mode is set to scarcity, we basically train ourselves to seek out proof that we need more of everything. We focus on what we wish was different, and in doing so, we subtly reject all that we already have. This thought pattern breeds thousands and thousands of other thoughts with the same scarcity genetics, resulting in you chronically feeling as if you have nothing but problems. Considering we average about 60,000 thoughts per day, that's quite a barrage of negativity.”

If only, we could train our mind to think otherwise. 

Granted that we genuinely have a lot to do.

We need to ask ourselves -how can I become more present in each moment? How can I create the space to do the things I am truly passionate about? How can I stop the glorification of being busy?

Rethinking your business of busy-ness.

Here are some practical ways of rethinking your busy life and finding more balance and meaning.

Become more aware of your values. You can do a quick 5 minute values survey here. This shows you what your life truly demonstrates as being important to you. Now start consciously checking each thing on your to-do list and how it links to your top 1 or 2 values. If there is no alignment, there is likely to be a point of tension with these tasks. You need to ruthlessly either scrap them off your list and/or delegate them to someone whose values are aligned to these tasks. When you see an alignment of what you do with what is important to you, you get energised. So focus on managing your energy and not your time. If it is not aligned to your values, it won’t get done.

Reprioritise. I know this seems like an obvious one. By pruning items which are not in sync with your values, you create space for what is truly important. If you have a value of “family and friends” then go ahead and do that coffee with a friend you have not seen for ages. Visit the aunt in the hospital. 

Identify the big balls and the little balls. Fill your life and time with the ‘big balls’ first. The things that matter most. Those that are most aligned to your top values. Then add the little balls, the pebbles, then sand if there is space. This helps you reprioritise what is most important and creates flow. You get energised doing the things that matter and are meaningful to you. This gives you more energy to tackle the other important things as well.

Shift from lack mindset to abundance. Stop yourself from feeding your lack mindset. Use more empowering words to describe your life. Stop the glorification of being Busy. Our words have great power. They reflect our thoughts and our thoughts create our reality. Become more conscious and aware of how often you are having the thought or saying the words “I am so busy’ and ‘I don’t have enough time’. Refocus your thought to one of abundance: I choose to do things that matter to me. Once you feel you are at choice, you stop feeling like a victim. Your life will not be a slave to your google calendar and your to-do lists as YOU then choose what YOU will spend our time and our thoughts on.