“Life is what happens when you are planning.” That’s an old adage, and I’ll add a new variation: “Life is what happens when you are doing!”
If you’re busy, you know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s been only six weeks since the new year began with all its promise and promises—when we set our goals and then got after them. This year, we said, was going to be different! And then life happened.
The “swarm,” the minutiae of everyday life, intervened. We became busy with stuff. Real busy.
“Busy,” of course, often has a positive connotation. You’ve heard people say, “If you want something done, give that task to a busy person.” We all know people who, when you ask them how things are going, answer: “I am covered up!” They say that like being busy is a badge of honor, a sign of success.
It’s like the busier you are, the more important you are, and since you’re so busy, you must be pretty darn important!
But not long ago, one of my clients shared another saying with me: “Excessive busyness is a common form of laziness.” Now I gotta tell you, when I first heard that I was intrigued, but I wasn’t sure I really understood it. So I did a little research. Turns out, this is from a Tibetan proverb, and it basically means that busy people often are too occupied to focus on what’s really important. It’s easier to be busy than to commit to the more difficult things that truly matter. Too often, we confuse busyness with productivity; they don’t always go hand in hand.
I know you are busy. You have emails to answer, meetings to go to, projects in and out of the office to complete, and countless other things vying for your attention and time.
These are simply busy-making distractions. They are the “swarm.” And if you don’t manage the swarm, the swarm will manage you. And you won’t be happy with the end-of-the-year outcome. The year that was, at first, full of promise and promises will end in compromises and disappointments.
I’d like to suggest an excellent resource to help you focus on the important things first: Brian Tracy’s Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time. In this book, Tracy talks about getting your most important tasks done first—before you get distracted with the day-to-day. The frog analogy in the book comes from Mark Twain’s quote, “If the first thing that you do when you wake up in the morning is to eat a live frog, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that’s probably the worst thing that’s going to happen to you all day long.”
It’s funny, but it’s also true. So it this: Don’t get too busy to focus on what’s important, because being busy is not necessarily how you do what you do better.
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