We live in a time of constant busyness.
The thing is, we prefer being busy over actually doing less.
In her book Daring Greatly, Brené Brown , describes being “crazy busy” as a numbing strategy that allows us to avoid facing the truth of our lives.
She explains that we would rather fill the time with activities—any kind of activity—than to take the risk of finding ourselves alone with our thoughts. And our society encourages this behaviour: being idle or having too much free time is often considered a sign of laziness.
Between work tasks and social commitments, it’s easy to spend your entire week running around without really knowing where the time has gone.
To break free from busyness,Ness Labs has created a simple tool you can use to conduct a busyness audit and see what’s keeping you so busy.
Look at each quadrant in this order:
Irrelevant/Meaningless: Can you reduce or get rid of any of these?
Irrelevant/Meaningful: Are you sure you don’t have too many going on at the same time?
Relevant/Meaningless: Can you delegate some of these?
Relevant/Meaningful: Do you have enough time and energy for these?
Once you’ve completed the audit, you can change your life and work to reclaim your time. Don’t try to tackle the quadrants all at once. Start by eliminating as many irrelevant or meaningless tasks as possible, working your way up to making space for relevant or meaningful ones.
Some general thoughts about busyness:
Change your perspective. First, stop saying “I don’t have time”. Instead, say “It’s not a priority.” I find this is difficult for leaders to actually do.
Less doing, more achieving. Don’t measure productivity in terms of how many tasks you get done, but rather in terms of doing the ones that matter.
Start saying no. Don’t take on stuff just because someone asked you and you want to be nice. Question whether this new task will yield meaningful outcomes or if it can be delegated.
Make peace with inaction. To help you get comfortable with doing nothing, schedule time with yourself for dedicated downtime. Protect this rigorously.
"If you don't prioritise it, it has zero chance of happening."