The Cure for Busyness

The cure for busyness is to create a way of life that will not permit busyness. Being too-busy-to-be-busy is a motto to live by. It’s a way of knowing our limits.

That is, create a way of life that establishes firm limits and boundaries for times off, times to be alone and times to be with your family and times to relax and recharge and to read and walk and to garden and to just plain sit and look out the window.

It might be good to say that “I’m too busy to do that” might mean “That time is reserved for relaxation and it’s sacred.” We could begin by looking at evenings and Saturdays.

What is your wisdom on “busy-ness”? 

What is busy-ness? I suggest it is permitting a schedule so full we cannot fulfill our callings the way we know they need to be done.

What are the causes of busy-ness? or the motives? Maybe it begins in greed, ambition, idolatry of work, fame, reputation, guilt, and poor boundaries.

Brigid Schulte is right: for too many being busy is a mark of honor.

Somewhere around the end of the 20th century, busyness became not just a way of life but a badge of honor. And life, sociologists say, became an exhausting everydayathon. People now tell pollsters that they’re too busy to register to vote, too busy to date, to make friends outside the office, to take a vacation, to sleep, to have sex. As for multitasking, one 2012 survey found that 38 million Americans shop on their smartphones while sitting on the toilet. And another found that the compulsion to multitask was making us as stupid as if we were stoned.

Burnett, a communications professor at North Dakota State University, has studied a trove of holiday letters she’s collected stretching back to the 1960s that serves as an archive of the rise of American busyness. Words and phrases that began surfacing in the 1970s and 1980s — “hectic,” “whirlwind,” “consumed,” “crazy,” “constantly on the run” and “way too fast” — now appear with astonishing frequency.

People compete over being busy; it’s about showing status. “If you’re busy, you’re important. You’re leading a full and worthy life,” Burnett says. Keeping up with the Joneses used to be about money, cars and homes. Now, she explains, “if you’re not as busy as the Joneses, you’d better get cracking.”

Even as neuroscience is beginning to show that at our most idle, our brains are most open to inspiration and creativity — and history proves that great works of art, philosophy and invention were created during leisure time — we resist taking time off. Psychologists treat burned-out clients who can’t shake the notion that the busier you are, the faster you work, and the more you multitask, the more you are considered competent, smart, successful. It’s the Protestant work ethic in overdrive.