Generally speaking, busy is bad. There are certainly times when it can be a good thing, but we weren’t designed to constantly be busy. As I shared a few weeks ago, Jesus was never busy, and that seems like a pretty good ideal to live up to.
In his book “The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry“, author John Mark Comer explains how busyness used to be a sign of poverty, but lately it’s become a sign of wealth. From the book:
“Harvard Business Review recently conducted a study on the change in social status in America. It used to be that leisure was a sign of wealth. People with more money spent their time playing tennis or sailing in the bay or sipping white wine during lunch at the golf club. But that’s changed. Now busyness is a sign of wealth.”
It’s hard to point to a reason why, and it’s almost like busyness is what we think wealth looks like, but real wealth is usually surrounded by free time (such as being able to mow your own grass).
Much of this comes down to defaults. If you ask someone how they’re doing, you almost always get one of two responses: “good” or “busy”. Changing that default can be helpful, as shared in the book “Big Potential“:
Similarly, instead of returning a harried coworker’s stressed nonverbal expression with an equally stressed grimace of your own, return it with a smile or a nod of understanding. Likewise, every time someone asks “How are you?,” try to resist the urge to complain and instead (as long as it’s authentic) answer with something uplifting like “Today is going great” or “I can’t believe how nice it is outside.” This simple technique will give you the power to change the tenor of the conversation to positive before the person even has a chance to reach for default conversational topics such as stress, fatigue, or how they are counting the minutes until five o’clock.
We all get busy from time to time, but it’s not something that we should really be proud of. Work hard, but hopefully work smarter as time goes on so you can really dig into what you do instead of just busily running from task to task.
