Busy is a (Bad) Choice
“For me, it is often harder to be away from the job than to be working at it.” - Richard Nixon
Molly Phelps found herself in tears in the middle of a pumpkin patch. She had spent 18 years as an ER doctor, but in July 2021, in the midst of COVID, she decided she was done.
So why was Molly crying in the pumpkin patch? She was crying because she had a sense of peace. She was on a weekend trip with her children, in the middle of a field picking pumpkins, and she realized she was happy for the first time in two years.
Molly hated the expression, “you’re more than your job.” For the previous 18 years, being a doctor was her identity, so she sacrificed sleep, family time, and mental health to do it.
But as Ed Yong wrote in The Atlantic, Molly felt no identity crisis when she left. It turns out, after 18 years she didn’t actually need the busyness of the healthcare grind to be happy. Busy was a manufactured state that probably never needed to be.
Marco Rubio had a similar realization:
I think I understand now that the restlessness we feel as we make our plans and chase our ambitions is not the effect of their importance to our happiness and our eagerness to attain them. We are restless because deep in our hearts we know now that happiness is found elsewhere, and our work, no matter how valuable it is to us or others, cannot take its place. But we hurry on anyway, and attend to our business because we need to matter, and we don’t always realize we already do.
He wrote this after his three year old son nearly drowned in a pool. Rubio was too busy taking a fundraising call to notice.
Molly Phelps and Marco Rubio were lucky enough to realize the danger of their busyness before it became their ruin. Many people don’t have the same good fortune.
Consciousness, in most cases, is the cure for the busy trap. And luckily for us, being conscious is simple, albeit not always easy.
What do I mean by consciousness? Well if we’re being honest, busy doesn’t just happen. You create it. You’re equally equipped to prevent it by placing the consciousness filter between opportunities and actions.
With each opportunity, ask yourself some questions:
Is this something I want to do?
What benefit will I receive?
Does this opportunity contribute to the areas of my life I care about, or is it more of a distraction?
What will I have to remove or reduce to make room for this opportunity?
That isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s a window into the mindset you should use when analyzing opportunities. And you should analyze every opportunity.
People fall into the busy trap for two main reasons. The first is a scarcity mindset, and the second is a desire for distraction. Let’s first look at the scarcity mindset.
Scarcity mindset
When you have limited resources or opportunities, you want to seize them all. This is an evolutionary adaptation of our species. When our ancestors came across a patch of berries, they gorged themselves. They had to because they might not find berries again for months—hence scarcity.
My Grandpa always told me he had to eat quickly as a child. He grew up in a house with five brothers, so if he didn’t eat quickly, he didn’t eat at all.
When resources or opportunities are few and far between, you become conditioned to strike while the iron is hot. You don’t let opportunities pass you by because you don’t know when the next one will appear. When you’re truly in a position of scarcity, this is a good mindset to have.
Remember when you graduated college and were anxious for your first job offer? You were willing to take anything that came your way. That was scarcity.
Then when you landed the job, you said yes to every assignment. You worked until midnight, networked like crazy, and agreed every time a manager asked you to do something extra. It was the only job you’d ever had. You needed the money. You had few skills and little experience, and you didn’t know if another offer would ever come your way.
Resources were scarce, so you had a scarcity mindset.
Most of us start in a similar position, so understandably, the scarcity mindset becomes burned into our brain. It’s a good place to be for a while. We all need to work hard when we’re young, say yes to every opportunity, and cast our nets as wide as possible. It’s how we learn, build a reputation, and lay the groundwork for the rest of our lives.
The tricky part is the transition. At some point, after you’ve built the skills, gained the experience, grown the network, and said yes to everything, opportunities will start to flow your way. And they’ll flow your way because you’ve said yes to everything thus far. It’s exactly at this point when you need to switch your mindset from one of scarcity to one of abundance. If you don’t, you’ll fall into the busy trap.
The point of transition is different for everyone. Some people graduate from an Ivy League school with marketable skills, come from a family with a robust network, and begin their career with more options than most people can imagine. Other people won’t go to college, won’t have many skills, and won’t have a family with connections. These two people will transition from scarcity to abundance at different times. But the fact is that most people will be able to transition from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset at some point in their lives. When this time comes, you must acknowledge it—be conscious about the switch—and change the way you make decisions to avoid an unfulfilling life of unnecessary busyness.
Desire for distraction
The second source of busyness is a desire for distraction. This type of busy is a manufactured state.
You create busy work in your business to avoid the hard work of streamlining. You fill your professional schedule so you don’t have to address relationship issues. You fill your personal schedule so you have an excuse to avoid exercise.
Most of these decisions stem from insecurity and avoidance. They all lead to the path of least resistance.
If you’re having problems with your spouse, is it easier to go to counseling or to stay at work late? If your business is reaching an inflection point, is it easier to put your head down and work extra hours or take a week to learn the new software you need to implement? If you’re getting a little doughy around the midsection, is it easier to schedule sessions with a personal trainer or schedule a night out with your friends?
Filling your schedule helps you avoid the problems you don’t want to solve. In most cases, you can trick yourself into thinking you’re doing the things you need to do. And if not, at least you have an excuse—”I’m too busy to do that right now!”
I don’t have time for counseling, we have to close this deal by year end. I don’t have time to learn new software, I have too many new customers I need to help. I don’t have time to go to the gym, I really want to make it to bowling league with my buddies.
But almost every time, an objective third party could look at your schedule and tell you exactly what you should cut. You could probably do the same, but you prefer the distraction of busyness.
Beating busyness
When you feel overwhelmingly busy or when you’re putting off things you should be doing because you “don’t have time,” you must step backward and look inward. It will be uncomfortable, but you need to ask yourself two questions:
Am I stuck in a scarcity mindset?
Am I avoiding something I should be addressing?
Almost every time you’re busy, you’ll find you answer yes to at least one of those questions.
Only when you honestly answer the questions, and then take action to address the answers, will you be able to slow down and find peace. As Molly Phelps and Marco Rubio realized, busyness isn’t a necessity. Busy is a choice—a bad choice.
Photo by Federico Respini on Unsplash
