Note: This article is based on a blog post by Tim Denning, in which he discusses the negative impact of being busy.
Hard work is a cover for insecurities?
I had a well-known leader at my workplace; most of our colleagues in the office admired him. He was very charismatic and confident too, but the problem was that you could not spend time with him at all; he was always in a hurry, and he made me feel like he was acting this way because he didn't like people, even though I'm sure this wasn’t the case.
He would go from one meeting to the next, doing all the paperwork after hours to make sure he didn't waste a single moment that could have been spent meeting clients and pitching to them, and he'd go to the office to work instead of spending time with his kids. One morning I'd come to work, and he wasn't feeling fine.
I asked him if he was alright; he said he had had a rough night, and after a few weeks I heard that his wife had left him, taking their children with her; she was tired of him being so busy all the time, and it totally broke him; he took a step back in his career, gained weight, and lost most of his hair; he became an old man with gray hair; his high self-confidence disappeared; and he became a walking ghost.
Busy people strive to prove to people who don't care about them that they are worthwhile, smart, and good at everything. Striving to gain people’s acceptance is poverty; it makes you a prisoner and limits your potential.
When I was young, I was an insecure person with no self-confidence. I was being treated for a mental illness, but eventually I was able to manage my insecurities, and I got help from a psychiatrist.
Busyness only covered up my problems, not solved them. Your confidence comes when you work on your biggest problems, and confidence comes from taking action, not avoiding the truth.
What busy people avoid?
Busy people don't have time to sit and think; they live in the hope of tomorrow. When you are alone, you have evil thoughts, but when you are busy, you can avoid thinking and push all bad thoughts away. This is what makes busyness an addiction for some people.
Being busy can take away pain, but not forever. At some point, a person has to come to terms with their pain or give in to it, and most people see busyness as an escape from reality as well as a virtual world in their heads that they can escape to when they don't want to feel or deal with the discomfort.
As the French mathematician Blaise Pascal said, "All of humanity's problems stem from our inability to sit quietly alone."
The smart approach of busy people
If you learn how to work smarter by letting go of things, avoiding distractions, and focusing on your real priorities, you won't need to be so busy.
Busyness is a stupid way to work. It is the slow road to hard work, and you can say it is also arrogance.
There are smarter ways of doing things. If you avoid finding another way to work that doesn't make you too busy, then you're possibly not easily teachable or coachable, or you're an expert and know-it-all.
Busyness is the worst form of selfishness
To go back a bit to the person I spoke about at the beginning, his family wanted him so badly, yet he robbed his wife of a happy marriage and robbed his children of the opportunity to spend their childhood with their father.
In my opinion, this is selfishness in itself. So don't be selfish; love does not mean being busy. Give your time to those who deserve it.
Dissemination of resources in several areas
We fall into the trap of busyness because of our view of time. I can give you an example of busyness as taking the jug of water that represents all your resources and over-pouring it in one area of life. This water overflows, spills on the ground, and then leaves the area of life. The other areas are all dry.
You have to spread your resources in many aspects in order to live a good and balanced life; otherwise, the volume of work will double because of your busyness, and chaos will prevail in other aspects of life.
Busyness can happen by chance
If you are always busy, I will excuse you by saying that you may think you have enough time when you do not. So be pessimistic when it comes to time; think about how much time everything will take, and assume that people want to waste your time because they don't value theirs.
Expect tasks to take longer than they actually do, and then schedule them less.
Conclusion
Money is not the most precious resource in life; it is time. If you don't have enough time, you are broke and live in extreme poverty. So earn your time again and stop looking at being busy as something to be proud of, because no one cares about the amount of work you accomplish, and also because busyness is one of the biggest causes of divorce cases, and if we weren’t so busy, we would have avoided many of them.
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