Busy

I’ve been very busy this quarter.

Busy is a word and an idea that I have fought for a long time. It is a boring, trite, and sometimes dismissive way to say that life is full. In less honest moments, busy is a dodge.

One of the larger challenges of being present is knowing what you’re present with. This is the power of gratitude lists, correctly booked calendars, meetings with agendas, and tangible steps towards real goals. You’re pulling back the white-wash of busy and examining what busy really is. The brutal truth that the hustle and bustle might not be worth it.

And yet, we all get busy. We might say yes to too much or have someone say yes on our behalf, or it just happens. Life colludes to stack a set of demands, reschedules, or opportunities to fill your days and nights.

I have two lines of defense for busy. The first is that I try really hard not to say that I’m busy. There are all of the reasons I listed before (boring, trite, and dismissive) and more fundamentally, it is me failing to honor the question.

• “How is life?”
• “How are you?”
• “How is work?”
  

Whatever the variation might be of someone checking in on me, even just politely deserves a better answer than “busy.”

Selfishly, thinking or uttering the phrase “busy” is also a sure sign that I need to pull back, that I need to take some time to assess where I’m at and why I’m there.

I think there is a lot of confusion on what pulling back necessitates. It is vitally important (literally) that you have fun, enjoy hobbies, and invest in your social circles. Life is meant to be lived. It’s also essential for you to get your shit done. Life and leadership are full of dichotomies, this is one of them.

My second line of defense is a little less straightforward. It is a disciplined approach to my calendar and my outcomes. My outcomes come from my goals, my job, and my clients. My calendar, like your calendar, is how I measure time. Time is famously nonrenewable. When I start feeling busy, here are my tactics:

• Commit to a daily planner, update it daily
  • This is not your email associated calendar (Outlook, Google Calendar, iCal, etc.)!
  • Low-tech works
  • I like The High Performance Planner
• Outline your obligations and the things you’ve already committed to
  • Include exercise, meals, and travel time
• Reflect on your other priorities and add them to your daily planner
• Add these blocks of time to your email associated calendar

Day-after-day, week-after-week, I have gotten much more realistic about what I can accomplish in a day. I also have a better record of what’s getting done and not getting done. Most importantly, I’m owning my calendar which is a critical habit of success.

I know I make this sound easy and it has been a serious struggle for me. Per Gretchen Rubin’s The Four Tendencies, I’m an Obliger. I’d prefer to put other people’s priorities ahead of my own with predictable outcomes. I accept calendar invites, say yes, and avoid the non-existent conflict of carving out time on my own calendar.

To adapt to this tendency, I started by adding my bus commutes to my calendar. My next step was recurring appointments for exercise. From there, I highly recommend some experimentation. I tried scheduling regular “block” times, you know 60 to 90 minutes, where I’d be highly productive. The trouble with these blocks is that I need a lot of clarity stepping into them. Setting the expectation to produce, regardless of precursors has been a recipe for disappointment and negative self-talk. What has worked a lot better is to maintain two lists. The first is to-dos with estimated times for large tasks, the second is habits I’m building, like writing (45-minutes, three times per week). I can then drop these blocks into my schedule, honoring my available time, priorities, and my level of energy/focus. Try as I might, I’m not a robot:)

Do I still feel busy at times? Absolutely. The good news is that I have habits to fall back on. Programs I can run that help me grind through the high-priority tasks and keep me connected to my humanity;)