⏱️ The Best Minute: What we mean when we say we are busy
💡 1 IDEA FROM ME
When we say we are “busy,” we typically mean one of three things:
I’m reactive, not proactive, with my time
When we say we're busy, it is often due to being reactive to incoming demands, requests, and fires that need putting out, rather than being proactive and intentional about how we spend our time. Instead of choosing where our time and energy will go, we let every notification and incoming email dictate how we will spend the next few minutes. If you do that all day, you’ve had a “busy” day, but not a productive one.
Instead, we should plan when we will check and respond to email. When we will make space in our calendar for meetings. When we will take a break. As well as when we will focus on a particular task or project and not let anything else encroach on that time. You’ll always feel busy if you live reactively. Sometimes, business just means we don’t prioritize things well.
I don’t have the courage to be honest (i.e. I never tell people “no” so I have too much going on)
Sometimes we find ourselves overwhelmed because we are trying to do too much. It can be hard to say “no” or to decline a request. And if we aren’t able to decline
Remember, no one knows all that you have going on. We are all instead focused on what we have to do. And if someone can help us accomplish what it is we have to do, we will often ask. It’s up to you to know how much time you have to give to extra responsibilities and when it is no longer healthy or prudent to do so. If you feel busy in this season of life, how much of it is due to not saying no?
Developing the courage to politely decline low-value commitments takes a little work, but it is much better than feeling busy.
Look at how important I am
We would never say this, but in some cases claiming to be busy is a way to justify to ourselves to others that we matter. Our culture celebrates those who do and accomplish, so if we are not doing then we think we must not be important.
The problem, of course, is that merely doing things doesn’t mean what you are doing is valuable.
But it feels good in some ways to feel busy, or at least to say we are. “I must matter because I have a lot going on,” or so we think. But if “busyness” is often a symptom of reactivity towards life, being busy may mean we don’t understand how important our time really is.
Next week in The Best Minute I’ll share the one thing you need to change on your phone to exponentially increase your ability to focus (this isn’t clickbait either, I promise).
📖 1 BRIEF BOOK REVIEW
All about building new habits and why they should start small. I've read a good bit about habit building (I write a newsletter on productivity after all), yet there were still new and different insights in this book.
I found it to be a little long, and I would have enjoyed it more if I was newer to the subject, so that made the book not quite as novel for me as it will be for others. Still, there were some helpful ideas to think about.
Fogg does a good job giving a lot of practicality in this book, so if you've got some habits or changes you'd like to make, this would be a helpful read.
It was good overall and likely would be rated higher by me if I wasn't as educated on the topic. 7/10
7/10
🤔 1 QUESTION TO LEAVE YOU WITH
What hours doing my day are my favorite and what changes can I make to ensure I am maximizing them?
P.S. The smartest teacher.
