Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
IT’S A BAD RELATIONSHIP
Introduction
In this chapter, you’ll discover the signs of your brand of Busy and the pitfalls of the relationship you have with Busy. After exposing both, you’ll be ready to take your first step to breaking up!
15 Signs That You Need to Break Up with Busy
You have a sense that things are just not right.
At the end of the day you feel worn out and foggy.
You have a mixed sense of not doing much and yet doing too much.
You have resigned yourself to feeling “…this is normal.”
You have a growing awareness that you are faking happy.
You blame others for the demands on your schedule.
You eat at least one meal each day standing up, on the go, or while driving.
Guilty pleasures are not an option; there is no time for frivolity.
Your health has changed; gaining or losing weight, skin issues, feelings of stress, anxiousness, and irritability.
Lifestyle habits have changed; lack of sleep, insomnia, low libido.
Things you once enjoyed taking time for now feel like inconveniences.
Your co-workers are calling you too much.
Your kids are calling you by your first name.
Your family has posted a missing person report.
STEP AND REPEAT, only without the designer dress and paparazzi -- just you, your list, and an hour behind your schedule!
Ok – so a bit of fun on the last four Busy signs. Nonetheless, Busy is not to be taken lightly. If you answered yes to at least five of these conditions you’ve got a demanding case of Busy. Being Busy is like dating the bad-boy; exciting, provocatively unnerving, dangerous, and inevitably leading to heartbreak. Except being in a relationship with Busy will lead to a break of a different kind; breaking down your health. Ignoring the signs of Busy is easy in the beginning of the relationship; its new, and all seems possible. But then, you get into the STEP and REPEAT of Busyness, and undoubtedly your anxious rushing will lead to illnesses, mistakes, and even accidents.
The Cost of Your Health in This Busy Relationship
Living with Busy is not as harmless as it may seem – it negatively and consistently impacts your health. The fifteen signs of being Busy could be indications of innumerable discontents. Being Busy doesn’t happen in a bubble; Busy behavior trickles down and ripples out. The energy of these behaviors affects everyone with whom you come into contact, and the more time you spend with these people -- your kids, partners, spouses, and co-workers -- the more they will be affected. As parents, we are teaching our children how to be Busy. As professionals, we are letting others know we have moveable boundaries that they can repetitiously step over.
The Business of Busy
Many of us once considered the implications of our biological clocks, and now we are obsessed with the tick-tock of the clocks on our nightstands, cell phones, and automobiles. Technology and its tantalizing time-saving gadgets have turned us into time wizards; like a Willy Wonka conveyor belt pumping out numerous tasks, appointments, errands, meetings, and chores while we text, talk, and take notes for our next mission of Busyness. Let’s not forget the original purpose of clocks; labor! The manufacturing industry used clocks to synchronize their labor force and unify all workers to begin and end their days on time. Now we are a union of one and we’ve forgotten to blow the whistle at quitting time. Oh, that’s right, there is no quitting time! TV is 24/7, we can order food any time of the day and have it dashed to our doors, we can date while eating a bowl of ice cream in our PJs at 2pm on a Sunday via the internet. Heck we can even file for divorce, pay taxes, and find a relative living in a cave somewhere in South America without ever leaving our office chairs or backyards. Anything we want we can have anytime we desire, and therein lies the problem; Busyness has no boundaries. It is an endless reservoir of doing. We exist in a culture of time-poverty that is swirling in a haze of have-tos. Leisure is secretly viewed as lazy. Sitting and doing nothing is for retired people! I don’t have time to do nothing, to just BE – I’m important and I have important stuff to get done. “I’M BUSY!”
Time is a scarce commodity traded at high value with low returns. It’s a Ponzi scheme. On the surface, we habitually access technology thinking it aids us in freeing up time and space, but at the core of this behavior is a stream of additions and acquisitions. We can Facebook all of our friends with a few strokes of the keyboard; we can text a conversation and avoid the time-absorbing niceties that are expected in a phone call; we Instagram our daily moments like a professional photo shoot with age-enhancing filters and hashtags galore to let the world know – We’re BUSY!
SIDE BAR QUOTE: Just because you CAN, DOES NOT mean you SHOULD.
Time is Money
The feeling of rushed and out of time --busy -- has transcended socioeconomic confines and has become embedded in our get-it-done culture. And as economies grow and incomes rise we attach a financial value on time – it’s worth more. We begin to covet and manipulate time. We negotiate with ourselves the use of time, often with a sense of urgency and anxiousness. The less we have, the more we want and so go the hands of time around the clock – tick-tock, tick-tock, until we simply, RUN OUT OF TIME.
Are You Enjoying Busy?
So, what is the pay-off for being Busy? What do you get out of it? What changes for you when you’ve gone through your list and crossed off the tasks? Do you feel rewarded? Recognized? Revived? Ask yourself -- Is this relationship working for me, or am I working for it?
It’s Time to Break Up
Is Busy dating outside of your relationship? You bet it is. Busy has got a lover and that lover is Multi-Task. Hand in hand, Busy and Multi-Task keep the motion in motion. Being Busy and the perception of time scarcity has led us to fitting as much as possible into our days. When was the last time you went anywhere without your phone? We no longer just drive somewhere listening to music; we make plans for what we will do next. Appointments, reservations, schedule a pick up or a drop off of something or someone. We check our email, we Pin, Like, Post, Tweet, and Gram our entire life so that at the end of the day, when we look back on all of our social media friends, members, and pokes, we can remember what we did. We need the download and update because we were so not fully present when we were doing-what-we-were-doing because we were too busy being somewhere else.
We’re all busy. Whether you are running your own company, climbing the corporate ladder, or you’re the chief operating officer of your family; home duties have not changed much since the 1950’s, during which time 34% of women in America worked outside of the home. According to a 2015 U.S. Department of Labor report, the US workforce is made up of 57% women and 70% of those women have children under eighteen. On average, in 2015 women earn 19% less than men, and we still continue to overwhelmingly take on the responsibilities of the home life, in addition to the demands of our professional careers.1.2.
Busywork once meant fixing things, doing needlework, or tidying up. It was never meant to be a way of life. Of course, things have to get done - it’s part of life. But if being Busy is to the point that your health and relationships suffer and the enjoyment in your day evaporates like the foam on your morning latte, those are red flags that it’s time to break up with your brand of Busy.
Discovering your motivations, opening your awareness, implementing the 5-Step Super Solution Process and using the other solutions in this book will get you to break up with Busy once and for all. In the next chapter, you’ll uncover your strategies for managing and maneuvering your life and in doing so, you’ll redefine those that are working and others that you’ll drop altogether. You’ll reintroduce yourself to YOU, and begin reclaiming your daily living. After all, THIS IS YOUR LIFE, not the leftovers of a life you give away, but the life you nurture, honor, and expand.
