Frequently when I ask people how are they doing I hear, “busy.” Everybody seems busy. Being busy seems like a good thing. But being busy is not much better than being idle. Instead, “busy” is a four letter word.
When we answer that we are busy, we are talking about lots of activity … and by implication we are saying that we’re not getting results. Imagine you are in business, and you just had a record revenue month. If someone asked you how you’re doing, you wouldn’t say, “busy.” You’d say, “I’m having a record breaking month.” If you were mentoring people and your people were having significant breakthroughs this week, and someone asks, “how’s it going?” you wouldn’t answer, “Busy.”
Note that having high activity and being busy aren’t the same thing. When I am engaged and highly active, focused on specific outcomes, I don’t tell people I’m busy. I tell people, “I’m killing it this week.”
Here is what it means to be busy.
Unclear Outcomes
A lot of us are being busy without a clear target. Quite a while ago I was in a business group. Someone suggested we make a rack card to give out. I asked, “why do we need a rack card?” And the answer was, “I don’t know, but we’ve got to do something!” So, we’re doing lots of just anything because we’ve got to do something, but we don’t know what we are accomplishing. We’re just being busy.
Unfocused Activity
If we don’t have clear outcomes, we don’t know what to do, and we don’t know what to stop doing. We just do the next thing that arrives. We do what’s asked of us, if we have time. We end up on 5 committees, take our kids to 3 different sporting events, work our job, do the laundry, fix dinner, and crash on the weekend exhausted. We don’t ask, “Is this activity is going to move my life in the direction I want?” There’s no direction to compare it to. Our activity is all over the place. We’re just being busy.
Too Tired
When we’re busy, we’re too tired to pay attention to people. Our relationships degrade. We put the activity ahead of the people in our lives. We tell our kids, “I’d love to play ball, if I have time.” Our interactions with our spouse ends up being about the laundry list of things to do rather than deeply connecting with each other. We’re being too busy for people.
The irony of it all is that we’re too busy to stop and consider the direction we’d like to go. We’re too busy to get clarity and focus to decrease our load. We hear it often. “I’d like to get clear on my life’s legacy, but I don’t have time in my schedule.” No wonder it feels like a rat race. We’re so busy we can’t get off the “busy” wheel.
The Big Picture
In the big picture, where is your life heading? What is the legacy you want to live? What do you want the outcome of your life to be?
Do you want it to be that you took a lot of vacations, or that you played a lot of golf? Do you want there to be some people who were deeply and positively affected by you? Would you like there to be some recognizable ripple effect from your life? Do you really want to just be busy your whole life and then die? Is that good enough?
The punch line is that if we get clear and focused, we stop the busyness. We know what to say, “yes,” to and we know what to say, “no,” to. We focus on what’s important and meaningful. We ditch what’s unimportant and empty. And when we become highly active it’s always done with an eye on the target.
If your life isn’t focused on the legacy you are creating, you are going through the motions and just being busy.
