There’s a famous line in one of Bob Dylan’s song in the 1965 album Bringing It All Back, It’s Alright, Ma, that said: “That he not busy being born is busy dying.” This indicates that if you have a busy life, you’re living the right life. Yet have you realized the paradox of modern life? The more we throw ourselves into countless nights preparing for a project, working overtime on the weekends, etc., the more we lose control over our life.
A catchphrase from people who chose to focus on their work and put aside entertaining as well as life experience is “sorry, I’m busy.” We live in a time where busyness is becoming the scale of success. A businessman spending 2-3 extra hours meeting with clients to help finding new business partners, an office worker working overtime everyday trying to be honored “employee of the year” in order to get a promotion, or a freelancer having 2-3 jobs at the same time to pay the bills, all these examples are no doubt hard works and efforts, but are they really meaningful?
A study of Harvard Business Review showed that most workers spend 80% of their day on activities that seem to make them busy but actually don’t, and they fail to justify whether that activity boosts productivity or not. They admit the purpose of getting busy is simply to fill up those 24 hours.
Luckily, the fastest way to get out of that vicious busying cycle is to ask ourselves: does our busyness satisfy our needs? As long as you feel productive and be able to control your busy schedule, then you’re busy living and enjoying that busyness. But on the contrary, if you just pretend to be busy for others and to make you feel like being productive, then you’re fantasizing yourself and maybe you should reorganize your “busy” schedule.
