Why Are You Too Busy?

There is a coffee mug that has this statement written on the side: “I’ve been put on this earth to do a certain number of things. Right now I’m so far behind, that I’ll never die!”

Do you feel like that?

When you look at your to-do list, does it make you want to burn it or run away? Does it make you want to do something else that’s not on your list like play a game on your phone, check your email, or browse the Web?

If so, then rest assured that you’re not alone.

 

Most people are so busy that they run out of day before they run out of things to do. They literally drive themselves from one thing to the next until they collapse.

Collapsing takes on many forms. It could be that you simply fall into bed at night. If that’s the worst thing that happens, then you are among the fortunate few.

 

Cold

Maybe you get sick.

There are those who, when they get sick, refuse to rest.

Maybe you know someone like that. Maybe you’re like that.

If you’re not so sick that you can’t function, which is what real flu is like by the way, then you figure that it’s perfectly acceptable to carry on as if you were 100%.

You go to work, oblivious to the fact that you’re infecting everyone else, and you work-out at your local health club just as you did when you felt at your best.

To you, that is how a “real man” or a “real woman” behaves.

 

Post Viral Syndrome

There’s an illness that you ought to be aware of that is specially designed for you. It’s called post viral syndrome.

Do you know how you get it? It’s by pretending you’re not sick when you are. It’s by giving 100% when you’re not 100%.

And what happens is that instead of feeling cruddy for ten days or a couple of weeks, you feel like that for a couple of years.

 

Myalgic Encephalmyelitis (ME)

There are people, however, who miss this hint.

They press on in the belief that feeling lethargic and demotivated all the time is temporary, and that if they will themselves to get better and carry on as before, that eventually they’ll get well.

If you’re like that, then you’re half right.

If you keep pushing yourself even when you’re not well, then you won’t feel cruddy temporarily.

Instead, you’ll feel like that for the rest of your life.

That’s what Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, or ME as they refer to it in Britain, is called.

It’s persistent, chronic malaise, and it never goes away.

It’s a life sentence.

 

ME affects 17 million people in the world.

You don’t want to be among them.

These people sleep twelve hours per day because they’re too tired to do anything else. They take naps, too.

They’re lucky if they can go out for a couple of hours every day.

If they try to do more, then they can’t get out of bed at all the next day.

Of course, this means that they don’t have jobs, at least not outside of their homes.

 

Running faster is a bad idea

What does that tell you?

It tells you that running faster, scrimping on sleep, pressing on whether you’re or sick or not won’t solve your problem.

Instead, it will make matters worse.

 

Why are you so busy?

Some statistics:

 

Let’s add up the hours:

To make things a bit easier, let’s assume you work seven hours per day with an hour for lunch.

That won’t apply for school teachers, policemen, or members of our armed services. You can assume that they work at least 12 hours per day, four, five, or six days per week.

Let’s add in an hour of commuting time: 30 minutes each way.

For you, that may not be enough. The Wall Street Journal claims that we spend much more time commuting: 3½ hours per day.

We’ll round down for time spent on the phone consuming media. Make that one and a half hours.

And then we’ll add in the time you spend watching TV: five hours per day. More than 80% of Americans have DVR or Netflix.

What does that add up to? 16.5 hours.

 

To that you have to add sleeping. Most Americans don’t get enough.

The Center for Disease Control says that more than a third of Americans are sleep deprived.

That means they get less than seven hours per night. And when you see how busy you are watching television and checking your email, it’s easy to understand why.

 

Then you have to add the time you spend on what you might call “miscellaneous” activities: Laundry, dishes, shopping, cleaning, and cooking. All of these things are necessary and take time to accomplish.

If you have kids, then you have to consider all that that entails, not just getting them ready for each day, but also their school activities and homework, if you can understand it.

Even if you have a nanny, a professional cleaner or even a personal shopper, you’re not exempt from having to do some of this to a certain extent.

 

It’s obvious why you’re so busy.

It should be obvious now why you’re constantly rushed off your feet.

There aren’t enough hours in the day to do all that you’re trying to do.

You have to face that.

You can’t spend nine to 12 hours per day working and commuting, an hour and a half consuming media on your phone, watch television for five hours, shop, cook, clean, do laundry, get the kids to school and bring them home, and sleep seven to eight hours every night.

Our days are still only 24 hours.

And the thing is that if you don’t get control of your time, then you’ll always be too busy.

You’ll always be overtired and just on the edge of getting sick.

That leads to another problem which is that if you don’t take care of yourself, then you’ll never be able to take care of anyone else.

 

But here’s the punchline:

You waste most of your time.

Whether you like it or not, and whether you believe it or not, you waste most of your time.

How do you do that?

You will only find part of the answer by looking at the activities that fill your day.

 

For example, if you cut your daily television time down to one hour instead of five, then you’d have four hours to do something else. But you would be an exception if you used that time or much of it to “catch up” on your sleep, which is probably what you need the most.

Instead, you’ll go out to eat, or go someplace to watch a movie.

There’s nothing wrong with going to the movies, but a movie in a theater is the same thing as watching TV somewhere else.

 

Pareto’s Law

I want you to think about Pareto’s Law. Maybe you know it better as the 80/20 Principle.

The best explanation I’ve ever read of this Law is found in Richard Koch’s book, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less.

The Law is about input and output; effort and results.

Here’s what it says: 20% of input yields 80% of output; and conversely, 80% of input yields 20% of output.

That’s it. But if you can grasp what that means and put it into practice, your input will skyrocket and you will have more time to spend on what matters. You’ll also get a lot more done.

 

Here’s how it works.

A mere fifth of what you spend your time on gives you 80%, or the other four-fifths of your results; and you spend 80% of your time on things that only give you 20% of your results.

It’s possible that the ratios are more extreme than this; that, for example, 10% of your effort yields 90% of what you get.

The numbers will vary from person to person, but in every case, you will find that you get your biggest bang for the buck from the least amount of time, and then you’ll spend the rest of your day frittering away the time on stuff that doesn’t matter that much.

Since Pareto has taken the guesswork out of all this for us, let’s see how we can spend our time more efficiently.

 

Think about your job.

If you spend seven hours per day working in it, then only 1.4 hours, or one hour and 24 minutes, will give you 80% of your results.

You’ll then spend the remaining five and a half hours trying to accomplish the remaining 20% of what you’d do in a normal day.

That may seem extreme; but here’s what happens.

Every 20 minutes or so, you get interrupted.

You get a phone call. Someone comes over to talk to you.

You get an email notification on your computer.

You need to stretch your legs or do something else.

Every time you’re interrupted enough to break your concentration, it takes you 20 minutes to get back to where you were before then.

So, take the length of the interruption and add it to 20, and then you’ll know how much time that particular distraction took out of your day.

 

A typical interruption

Suppose on average, each interruption lasts for 10 minutes. That means that it only takes two of them to blow an hour of time.

If you get 14 of them in a day, then your day is gone.

It’s why you often get to the end of a workday feeling like you’ve been running hither and thither and accomplished nothing.

You didn’t accomplish anything.

All you did was deal with interruptions.

 

Now, recognizing that that’s what happens, it’s easy to understand why so many people come into their offices an hour or an hour and a half before everyone else.

They will even tell you that they get more done in that amount of time than they do all day.

 

But there’s more to their experience than they realize.

What’s 20% of a 35-hour week? Seven hours; right?

What’s seven hours divided by five?

It’s one hour and 24 minutes. (There’s 60 minutes in an hour. Multiply that times seven and then divide by five, and you get 84 minutes.)

Surprised?

 

What happens next?

If you know that you can accomplish 80% of what you need to do in 84 minutes, doesn’t that make it a lot easier to decide what’s most important?

When you look at things like this, then you realize that not only are all activities not created equal, neither are all minutes.

Some minutes are much more important than others. That’s because you can accomplish so much more in some minutes than in others.

 

What tends to happen, however, is that you assume that all of your minutes are of equal value; and when you do that, then there’s the risk that you’ll do what you need to do when you feel like it, instead of doing it when you’re most likely to achieve it.

That’s the difference.

 

Time spent away from the job

What about your time away from work? How do you spend it?

Think about the time you spend watching TV.

Five hours per day, on average, is a lot of time.

Now maybe you don’t sit for that long every evening during the week.

Maybe you watch TV in bed, or watch movies or sports for much of Saturday and Sunday.

It doesn’t matter.

You’ll want to be sitting down for this.

Five hours per day, seven days per week, is 35 hours – a full working week.

Did you ever imagine that you spent as much time watching television or movies – include in that surfing the Web – as you did working during the week?

The point isn’t whether you work hard all week and therefore deserve it.

Rather, it’s that if you’re running from pillar to post all week, then you could probably build some slack into your day by reducing the amount of time you crash for your nightly entertainment.

 

A challenge

So here’s my challenge to you.

Turn your television off for a week.

Unplug the DVR.

Use the time you’d normally spend watching TV or movies to go for a walk or to the gym, or to engage in some other physical exercise.

Read a book.

Take up a hobby.

 

Set a timer to check your email, social media, and the weather for a total of one hour. Do this only after your evening meal and make sure that there are at least two hours between the time you finish and when you go to bed.

Allow yourself those couple of hours before you turn the lights off to wind down.

Set your alarm, not to wake you up, but to ensure that you stay in bed for at least seven hours and preferably eight.

Don’t look at your phone in bed. In fact, put it on Airplane Mode so that you won’t hear any messages or texts come in after you turn off the light.

If you wake up early then, apart from a trip to the bathroom, go back to bed and stay there until your seven or eight hours are up.

 

At the end of the week, assess how much you accomplished and how you feel.

You should be more rested.

You should feel less stressed.

You should feel more in control.

Then use what you learned during that week to plan how you will spend your time the following week.

 

Things will not always go according to plan.

They seldom do.

But if you don’t plan, then you’ll drift; and it’s drifting that really eats up your time and slowly leads you into bad habits.

 

Your circumstances may prevent you from doing as much as I’ve suggested.

That’s okay.

The important thing is to experiment with how you spend your time and to do so until you find the balance that works best for you.

And please let me know in the comments below how you got on.

I’d love to hear of your successes and your challenges.

 

 

 

 

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