Lately I’ve been realizing that how
busy I feel isn’t necessarily a
reflection of how busy I am.
Of
course, I am truly busy. We all
are. I might not be quite as busy as
some people; if all of the busy people were in a pack I’d probably be somewhere
toward the middle, a six-and-a-half or seven on a scale of one to ten -- but
that’s busy enough, busy enough to
know all about busy.
When I was in
college and felt overwhelmed by all the exams I had to study for and papers I
had to write at the end of the semester, I used to go around asking my friends
what they had to do, and if they had more to do than I did I felt a little bit
better and if they had less to do I felt a little bit worse. And maybe now I’m worried that someone else
is going to be doing that with me – looking at what I’ve got to do every day
and saying, enviously and maybe a little bit rancorously, that’s easy for you
to say, you don’t have as nearly much to do as I do. If that’s how you feel I
don’t blame you – when I look back on my college days, and, to be truthful, some
other times since then, I know exactly how you feel.
But I truly
believe that it doesn’t really matter how busy you actually are. I’m convinced that you can feel anxious and
stressed about how busy you are even when you don’t have that much to do, and
you can be super-busy and still feel peaceful and serene. And that if you are
chronically anxious and stressed about how busy you are, there are easy ways to
get more peaceful without changing how busy you are.
So what makes us feel busy and what can we do about it? Last night when I was having dinner with my
friend Bruce, he said, “I used to feel like I had to do everything all the
time.” I introduced Bruce to my
harnessing time practices and now he, like me, plans his day most mornings by considering
what he’s going to do during the day as well as roughly when. Last night we were talking about how much we
like planning our days this way, and that was when he said what he said about
how he used to feel like he had to do everything all the time. And I thought, that’s exactly it – that’s
exactly what makes you feel busy no matter how busy you are.
Like Bruce, I used
to feel like I had to do everything all the time. I could never just settle down and do one
thing at a time without obsessively focusing on everything else that was on my
plate (yuck, I hate that expression). But I don’t do that any more. Nowadays,
I don’t feel like I have to do everything all the time, because I know (and so
does Bruce and everyone else who’s harnessing time) when I’m going to be doing
what and I also know that during that time I’m not going to be doing everything else. I know that all the other everything elses
will get done when their times come, and that until then I don’t have to worry
or even think about doing them.
One of the areas
of my life where I can see this working really well is in my writing coaching
business. I have a lot of clients and
I’ve learned that the way to carry on my business sanely -- the way to keep on
top of what I need to do with and for my clients and the way to keep myself from spending all my time on other
people’s writing and never doing my own – is to do everything I do with and for
my clients in chunks of time that I plan in advance. During a typical weekday I coach in two
one-and-a-half-hour sessions, and I write every single bit of coaching work down on my appointment calendar, even when I’m not actually meeting
with somebody but just editing their work.
I learned a lot
about how much this system was helping me not feel overly busy when I didn’t
stick to it recently. I have a client
who meets with me twice a month. This
client asked me to spend an hour editing some of his work in between his two
regular meetings and I said I would. I didn’t bother to find a spot for that
one little hour of editing because I figured it was no big deal. But somehow I never found time to do it, and
as my next meeting with this client approached I found myself getting grumpy
and anxious, feeling sort of guilty and even overwhelmed by the fact that I had
to do that one hour of editing and I just couldn’t find time to fit it in. I started getting that old time anxiety, that
I’m-too-busy, there-isn’t-enough-time-for-everything feeling; I started to feel
a little bit nuts, a little bit out of control – all because of that one stupid
hour. I decided that in the future,
whenever anyone asked me to do a little extra work (especially editing, where
I’m not meeting with someone in person so I have more wiggle room about when
I’m going to do it and it’s more tempting not to pin myself down), I would make
myself pick a time on my calendar when I could do it. I would put time aside for it, because if I
didn’t put time aside I’d end up not having time for it, and then I’d get the
rushed, I’m-too-busy, time anxiety feeling.
It’s amazing to me
that just one little hour of editing could result in so much time anxiety, but
it did. To me it said a lot about how
the real problem isn’t everything we’ve got to do – it’s the fact that we feel
like we have to do everything at once. In that case I just felt like I had to do two
things at once – the stuff I had scheduled on the days when I needed to do the
editing, and the one hour of editing itself. I was surprised by how strong and unpleasant
my feeling of time anxiety was -- that feeling of not having enough time to do
what I had to do. Maybe it was just that
I hardly ever have that feeling any more, so I really noticed it when I
did. But still – if just one little
thing that takes one hour can make you that miserable, just think of how
miserable you can be if it’s everything in your life all the time.
I learned a few
things from the whole experience: One,
it really isn’t just about stuff you have no control over, about the fact that
you have too much to do and not enough time to do it; it really is mostly what
goes on in your head and how you work with that.
Two, you can
change what goes on in your head by doing a few simple things, like picking a
spot in your week where you can do one hour of editing and doing the editing
during that hour.
And three, my
harnessing time practices are really working.
I think there’s at
least a four and a five too, on the topic of why we feel like we have to do
everything all the time, why that makes us feel crazy-busy, and what we can do
about it. But I’ll cover those in other
posts.
--
Mary Allen
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