Don’t be fooled by the idea that being always busy is good. If you’re not ‘productive’ often, you might be doing easy tasks. Being busy is seen as a sign of success today.
People love to talk about how busy they are. They think being busy means they’re productive.
This busy lifestyle can harm your personal and work life. It can stop you from climbing the career ladder or enjoying free time.
Being busy doesn’t always mean you’re doing a good job. It can also hurt your mental health.
Being busy doesn’t make you better at your job. It doesn’t mean you’re doing different work.
Some people are just busier than others. They do the same things as everyone else.
Being part of a team or keeping your skills sharp can help. But, don’t work too much. It’s not always effective.
People often confuse hard work with not being effective. In the corporate world, working long hours doesn’t always mean you’re doing well. We should focus on what’s truly effective.
There’s a big difference between being busy and being productive. This difference can affect your work, personal life, and time on earth.
What makes a person busy?
1. Fill your diary with times when you’re available to meet.
2. Having many meetings or attending unnecessary meetings, so you can say you’re busy.
3. Putting a high priority on responding to email and voicemail messages right away, so you can say, ‘I’m so busy. (A good habit, but if the priorities are not set)
4. Watching a lot of television or surfing the internet, and then claiming it all to be work (A poor habit, to say the least)
5. Taking long lunches or working in remote offices where you’re cut off from your co-workers so you can claim that you have a busy time.
The reason why these activities are considered ‘busy’ is that they require little mental effort.
For example, you can respond to an email immediately, get your voicemails, or meet with someone immediately without putting much thought into it. That’s why it requires little mental energy and is a low priority- you’re not doing anything important.
We often do these things, so we can say we are one of those busy people. And we say this because we think people will think we have a lot to do in a TO-DO list, so we’re productive.
So, How To Get out of Busyness?
1. Take a step back and analyze what you’re doing. What are you doing that is effective, and what are those things that don’t require much thinking?
2. Don’t let being ‘busy’ have such a high priority in your life but instead make it a third or fourth priority – something you could do when you’re out of essential things. Reschedule anything that can wait until tomorrow so you can work on more important tasks right now.
3. Choose to be productive when you want to be productive and choose not to if you don’t want to. Remind yourself that it’s okay to be doing important things, and remind yourself that you don’t need to make yourself feel wrong about not being busy by doing unimportant tasks.
You’ll find that once you stop being busy, your productivity will increase significantly- and the quality of your work might get better as well.
Busy Vs. Effective: How can I be productive but not busy?
You can be productive without being busy by:
1. Set a clear schedule that will allow you to get things done when you choose and leave spare time.
2. Creating small daily priorities and working towards them one at a time. For example, instead of multitasking (holding an email and watching TV together), do the email first, then watch TV. If you have a lot to do, prioritize it one at a time- don’t try to ‘do it all at once.
3. Maintaining a lot of rituals and routines, so you’re not working out of habit.
4. Have a good sleep schedule so you don’t get tired at the wrong time.
5. Maintaining a healthy routine for meals, exercise, and daily maintenance activities like brushing your teeth and getting dressed in the morning (the things another bunch of people takes as part of their everyday lives)
6. Eliminate unproductive distractions, like TV, the internet, and distraction games all around us, and get time for passion projects or project-based learning.
If you feel tired or stressed, try identifying why you’re doing some of these things. Is it because it’s just a habit, or is something else driving it? If there’s something else going on with you, then maybe that activity is not worth doing, and you are losing an insane amount f time. If you can do other things more effectively, eliminate them, and be more efficient in time management.
Sometimes, we just need to give time to time
You know, we all have a clock ticking in our brains. It’s ticking every second that we’re not working on something. Or we were thinking about something else. That means that our brain is working on something else. And it’s not just one thing. It’s probably a bunch of things, but the ones that matter are the most important, ones that can affect our life.
Successful people know that it’s not about working hard. It’s about working on the right things and having nonwork time. It’s about being productive instead of just being busy. So, what makes us more effective? Busyness or productivity?
To be more effective, we need to change something in our lives, but we also need to change something inside ourselves. Many feel there is no way out if they’re already feeling this way, but I want you to know that it’s not too late.
