“Busyness is laziness. You just allow yourself to be distracted and call that being busy. That’s not busy, it’s lazy!”
Steve Chandler

Every business I go into I hear “We are extremely busy”.

Sure, there are a lot of things to do in every business, I get that!
But “We are busy” is an self created illusion that is unfortunately supported by current day business cultures.

“Busy” has become an accepted term. We are supposed to be “Busy”.
When we meet some one else who says “I’m not busy” we immediately become suspicious.“How come he is not busy? Maybe we should give him some extra work”

So it has become popular to be a “hard worker” and “being busy” all the time.
“No sorry, I’m too busy for that” has become accepted.
“I’d love to talk, but I’m really busy” is another one.

And it’s a virus for corporate cultures.

There is no “Busy” in reality. When was the last time you saw a busy whale? Or a busy flower? It’s just a word that we made up to represent an emotional state that
we get into when we allow our heads to go into the future and think about all the things we need to do while being very inefficient at what we are currently doing.

Yes, that’s a long sentence but please read it again.

Whether I have 3 tasks on my list or 40 tasks it makes no difference because I can only do 1 thing at a time efficiently.

Consider these 2 scientific findings:

The brain can only do 1 thing at a time. When we get interrupted it takes us 10 minutes to get focused again.
1 hour of interrupted work is as efficient as 3 hours of interrupted work.
What’s more accurate than “I’m being busy” is “I’m doing busy thinking” or “I’m allowing my mind to race into an imaginary future while doing this task very inefficiently”

So the next time you hear yourself saying that you are “Busy” please remind yourself that you are DOING “busyness”.

Think of it this way: whales are never busy because they don’t have that word.

Wishing you are very effective week,

Richard