Over the last few years, I’ve spent a lot of time working with people with increasing workloads. I can probably hear the word ‘busy’ being used at least 10 times each week.
This week I read something that really struck me this week – that being busy isn’t actually linked to how much work you are doing. Instead, it’s a state of mind.
Now I’ll be honest – such statements can get people’s backs up – ‘how dare you say I’m not busy, after all look how many tasks I have to do over the next 3 days?!’
I am not looking to deny people’s reality, nor annoy people with my babble around mindset. However, the idea about being busy can quickly become self-fulfilling when we use it to constantly describe ourselves. The more we say we are busy, the more we feel stressed and under pressure. So seeing this statement gave me a moment to reflect.
What if you didn’t have to feel busy right now, no matter how much you’re doing?
Let’s take a step back. In our lives, we have approximately 70,000-100,000 thoughts each day. According to different sources, we take 35,000 decisions each day. If we were to count all of these things, or put these all down on a to-do-list, unsurprisingly we would find our days incredibly hectic. But most of us do these things without even thinking, so actually despite taking this many decisions, we do not actually find they make us busy.
Let me take you through my morning – I get up, pick clothes to wear, brush my teeth, take a shower, maybe put on some contact lenses (maybe not) use the different hygiene products. I then go downstairs, see what I have in the fridge, choose what I’ll have for breakfast (or whether I will eat anything), choose where I’m going to sit. Within that, that’s at least 10-20 decisions, and they have all come before I’ve even started my day.
Now, I don’t say I am busy because I have taken all these actions. They are automatic (supposedly around 98% of our decisions are taken without us thinking). So despite taking probably so many decisions, I feel like I have taken none at all.
However, if I started my day with a giant to-do-list, it would feel differently:
- wake up
- turn off alarm
- take shower
- choose clothes
- get dressed
- brush teeth
- use moisturizer
- choose whether to put on contact lenses
- [if I choose to put on contacts] put on contact lenses
- go downstairs
- check mail
- choose breakfast
and so on…
Suddenly, these tasks take a lot of conscious effort because I am making them into a process where I have to activate my mind and follow instructions.
So when I say that being busy is not about actions, what I’m really saying that it’s about how many actions we are trying to juggle into our conscious minds. This is as opposed to letting our unconscious mind complete them without thinking.
We can do lots of things to minimise the amount of mental energy we spend on tasks. The great news is that everyone knows how to, because we already are doing it. I don’t know anyone who walks around with a mental memory of all their calendar appointments – most have it on their online calendar (some even in a physical one). It means we don’t have to worry about what we are doing in three saturday’s time off the top of our heads. Without having to worry about that, we can move on with life.
Likewise, we can do many things to optimise the amount of mental energy we put on tasks. One of the greatest efficiency tactics I have is keeping a pretty much always clear inbox. I respond to emails when I get them, or archive. That way it is done. Often, people read an email and don’t know what to do. So they leave it there, only to return to it and re-read the contents a second or third time. This is draining you of your mental energy and is one of the reasons you are feeling fatigued. This is on top of the sense of overwhelm having an inbox filled with thousands of messages gives you.
The more we can ‘automate’ our lives the more we can simply glide through it doing a whole bunch of really cool things without thinking. I book my yoga classes so that when I know it’s time to go, I go. I’ve changed my relationship with commitments so when I said I will do something I generally do it, avoiding the uhmming and ahhhing around it or whether I should flake.
There are countless other examples that we can do which make our lives simpler and easier. the beautiful thing is that the more we do this, the more space we have to enjoy life and create what we want from it. The creative energy of freedom is one of the greatest things we can create for ourselves.
I understand that not all of us can simply eradicate certain responsibilities – work expectations, childcare arrangements or needing to respond to things as they come. And yet, I see so many people not look into this direction of how they can make their lives easier.
When I work with clients during my coaching, we often spend time exploring these patterns. This is often in workplaces, but also in their private life. By creating a space to reflect, it usually becomes pretty evident that there are ways to make life a lot simpler. For example, the way we can shift hte relationship with our colleagues at work so that we set expectations early, or how we can schedule date nights with our partners to not have the burden of needing to carve time away for them. Many of us don’t take the space to reflect on how we are doing things, and the coaching space is an excellent place to do that.
So if you are finding yourself in this space of feeling constantly busy, it may be a sign that you are running the treadmill of life without stopping to reflect how things can be different or optimised.
My offering to you is that you book yourself some time to reflect on how you can do things differently.
In fact, If you’ve found this article useful and you want to explore this further, drop me a message and I am happy to book that time to talk with you at how we can optimise your life. It will leave you feeling freer and happier.