Blog Dis
The illusion of busy, busy
2026-05-14
Time isn't your friend. Try to make time your friend and I'll show you a human being with a watch that's barely observed, only until they notice at the last minute that they've run out of time, and are still many projects behind schedule.
How do we wrestle with time to make ourselves its master? Answer: Very carefully. This is the principle reason, I believe, why alarm APPs that provide wake-up options are ideal for our mobile phones, which also tell time, play music, handle calls, videos and pictures. Yet, our technology hasn't allowed us to manage our time any better because technology is the culprit for distracting us from handling housework, relationship responsibilities, and our work and home projects, in a timely fashion. Technology has given us more reasons to waste our time. A good example is doom scrolling, as the current lingo goes, when you waste hours scrolling mindlessly. I've been guilty of doing this too, but only in the evenings for potentially no more than one hour.
I don't sleep with my mobile phone near me, not ever. I will, however, set an alarm using an independent clock when I absolutely have to wake up on time but I often wake up before the alarm. You'll notice this too as you go about your life, how the passage of time appears to be accelerating, the days evaporating like water on a hot stone. Kids, on the other hand, are the freest on the planet because they're not mindful of the time, paying no mind to what time does, the same every day, while their primary focus is to engage in play. No child wakes up wondering about the time or whether or not they've missed a deadline or how much time is involved for them to accomplish their tasks, the list of demands that must be met, in order to earn their keep. This is the domain of adults. We're very efficient at complicating our lives. Really good at it.
Adults, on the other hand, are all about achieving goals, to maintain their busy lifestyles like acrobats, and even more so if they're juggling multiple kids, or with some entrepreneurs, multiple side-hustles, and companies. I've one friend whose husband is best described by her as a workaholic. He loves to spend time with his wife only after his companies have been well-managed. Both work. Both are busy. Somewhere in this busy life they carve out time for themselves, otherwise their marriage would go bust, like so many.
Just how busy does your life have to get, before you recognize the need to pull back, to step away from the busy schedule of things to do, to fully appreciate that being busy is the grand illusion of time?
We're all slaves to time. Being busy is one way of allowing our time to be accounted for, like a ledger where each price, each tick of time is jotted down, which leads us to want to answer the question if our busy work ethic is worthy of being assigned even more time. This is one of the reasons why I've never aspired to own a large home, ever. I can look at a large home with massive property, as I've known many family and friends with these types of large homes, and my mind breaks down how busy the upkeep will gobble up time, in order for the home to be properly maintained. One individual, whose name I won't mention, could afford to hire cleaners twice a month to deep-clean four bathrooms, given their blended family. Yet, the quality of the work wasn't quite up to snuff and the owner ended up following behind after the cleaners had left, to polish and touch up their work. "I can't do any more today," this individual would say to me, "I expect to be busy after the cleaners leave." HaHaHa! This is what I call a house managing the homeowner's time.
Some persons have mastered time. Time works for them, not the other way around. These individuals are quick to state they don't work hard, they work smart, despite time moving along one second at a time, at the same rate it does for everyone else. It all comes down to passivity, I've decided, whether or not it bothers you if your busy life is put on hold, while a stack of dishes need to get done, the lawn needs to get cut, the weeds need to get pulled, the flowers planted, and laundry has to be washed. It goes on and on, and the busier we are the more we appear to be able to handle, until we stop, and our bodies push back, forcing us to hit the brakes: No More Busy! I used to hear this phrase often in the office, "I'm too busy!" The phrase turned out to be nothing more than an excuse to avoid having to speak with a person wanting a portion of their time, rather than acquiesce, to sit down with the individual. Maybe this is the ideal approach, rather than to acknowledge that you have no time, because this implies to some managers you're not managing your time very well.
Time management, like records management, is the kind of skill that flows like waves in the ocean. You will live your life and every decade you'll become a little better version of your previous self, better thinker, better planner, better able to wield your shield against time-stealers, which is how they should be named, to call them out in the professional work environment. Allow me to explain. If you've ever managed the busy calendar of a top executive, time management skills are the essential qualification. This means that your role is to manage their calendar, to keep it in tip-top shape, to ensure that every appointment is accounted for, to include those in between calls and meeting times when buffer time is essential for the Executive, to catch their breath or to take an organic break. I could never let it pass, however, if a young assistant would initiate a request to a group of senior assistants to ask each one to provide a good time for their executive to connect with theirs. This would result in a messaging stream of proposed date options that could ramble on for hours, and it did - a gargantuan waste of time.
Instead, I would cut this request off at the knees, and insist that the assistant attempting to line up multiple calendars for executives should issue one phone call request, in order that each EA could get onto a call to align calendars in real time. Presto! It would take less than 10 minutes to accomplish the scheduling. Was I rewarded for my brilliant suggestion? Nope. I would be privately and personally thanked by the senior EAs for minimizing the amount of their time to get the task done, citing, "This person is driving us all crazy."
This illustrates my point that an individual with years experience is better equipped to separate the wheat from the chafe and to recommend a more streamlined approach, to achieving the same goal. Technology may crucify us but it doesn't have to, in every instance. Some forms of technology, like virtual calendars, if managed properly, are worth their weight in gold... er, that should be worth their time, to color-code meeting requests, and to group each one into categories to suit the subject-matter.
We've all had that friend who procrastinates. We've all had that friend who never shows up on time. I'm a believer in passive-aggression, not to suggest that I believe in its validity but rather to imply there are many persons out there who adopt passive-aggressive natures, and who want to be the center of attention. Apparently, this is a definition from a psychologist as to why some of our friends show up late, because they don't want to conform to society's expectations of them. Instead, they want others to conform to them. One man I know would intentionally arrive late to every get-together so I questioned his reasoning and I got my answer. "If I arrive on time all the time, everyone will expect me to be on time all the time." All of us who knew him expected him to arrive late all the time. 😅So his method worked, though not always. Whenever he had an issue, and needed your help, he expected you to drop what you're doing to help him, never mind what you had lined up in your schedule.
Time is therefore also a tool to manipulate people. Our employers do it, such as the software platform called Teams, which is pushed out by Micros*ft, prior to Skype, until Micros*ft decided to purchase Skype and re-design and re-brand it as Teams, an application that allows managers to leap tall buildings in one single jump; able to manage multiple people at once, grouped into management teams on projects, if you want to split hairs. It's most notable trait was keeping track of productivity, by way of updating an employee's work status to 'Away', if their mouse had stopped registering clicks. This is no different than treating employees as though they're children, which would then enable their manager to question where had they been? Answer: to the washroom!
I'm accustomed to busy, to be often times too busy. Where I fail is in knowing how not to be busy, to relax to the point that my lethargy doesn't faze me one bit. I still need to learn how to fully relax, and I suspect it will take me some time to develop a strategy. Maybe by the time I learn this skill, I'll be dead. 🤔
How do we wrestle with time to make ourselves its master? Answer: Very carefully. This is the principle reason, I believe, why alarm APPs that provide wake-up options are ideal for our mobile phones, which also tell time, play music, handle calls, videos and pictures. Yet, our technology hasn't allowed us to manage our time any better because technology is the culprit for distracting us from handling housework, relationship responsibilities, and our work and home projects, in a timely fashion. Technology has given us more reasons to waste our time. A good example is doom scrolling, as the current lingo goes, when you waste hours scrolling mindlessly. I've been guilty of doing this too, but only in the evenings for potentially no more than one hour.
I don't sleep with my mobile phone near me, not ever. I will, however, set an alarm using an independent clock when I absolutely have to wake up on time but I often wake up before the alarm. You'll notice this too as you go about your life, how the passage of time appears to be accelerating, the days evaporating like water on a hot stone. Kids, on the other hand, are the freest on the planet because they're not mindful of the time, paying no mind to what time does, the same every day, while their primary focus is to engage in play. No child wakes up wondering about the time or whether or not they've missed a deadline or how much time is involved for them to accomplish their tasks, the list of demands that must be met, in order to earn their keep. This is the domain of adults. We're very efficient at complicating our lives. Really good at it.
Adults, on the other hand, are all about achieving goals, to maintain their busy lifestyles like acrobats, and even more so if they're juggling multiple kids, or with some entrepreneurs, multiple side-hustles, and companies. I've one friend whose husband is best described by her as a workaholic. He loves to spend time with his wife only after his companies have been well-managed. Both work. Both are busy. Somewhere in this busy life they carve out time for themselves, otherwise their marriage would go bust, like so many.
Just how busy does your life have to get, before you recognize the need to pull back, to step away from the busy schedule of things to do, to fully appreciate that being busy is the grand illusion of time?
We're all slaves to time. Being busy is one way of allowing our time to be accounted for, like a ledger where each price, each tick of time is jotted down, which leads us to want to answer the question if our busy work ethic is worthy of being assigned even more time. This is one of the reasons why I've never aspired to own a large home, ever. I can look at a large home with massive property, as I've known many family and friends with these types of large homes, and my mind breaks down how busy the upkeep will gobble up time, in order for the home to be properly maintained. One individual, whose name I won't mention, could afford to hire cleaners twice a month to deep-clean four bathrooms, given their blended family. Yet, the quality of the work wasn't quite up to snuff and the owner ended up following behind after the cleaners had left, to polish and touch up their work. "I can't do any more today," this individual would say to me, "I expect to be busy after the cleaners leave." HaHaHa! This is what I call a house managing the homeowner's time.
Some persons have mastered time. Time works for them, not the other way around. These individuals are quick to state they don't work hard, they work smart, despite time moving along one second at a time, at the same rate it does for everyone else. It all comes down to passivity, I've decided, whether or not it bothers you if your busy life is put on hold, while a stack of dishes need to get done, the lawn needs to get cut, the weeds need to get pulled, the flowers planted, and laundry has to be washed. It goes on and on, and the busier we are the more we appear to be able to handle, until we stop, and our bodies push back, forcing us to hit the brakes: No More Busy! I used to hear this phrase often in the office, "I'm too busy!" The phrase turned out to be nothing more than an excuse to avoid having to speak with a person wanting a portion of their time, rather than acquiesce, to sit down with the individual. Maybe this is the ideal approach, rather than to acknowledge that you have no time, because this implies to some managers you're not managing your time very well.
Time management, like records management, is the kind of skill that flows like waves in the ocean. You will live your life and every decade you'll become a little better version of your previous self, better thinker, better planner, better able to wield your shield against time-stealers, which is how they should be named, to call them out in the professional work environment. Allow me to explain. If you've ever managed the busy calendar of a top executive, time management skills are the essential qualification. This means that your role is to manage their calendar, to keep it in tip-top shape, to ensure that every appointment is accounted for, to include those in between calls and meeting times when buffer time is essential for the Executive, to catch their breath or to take an organic break. I could never let it pass, however, if a young assistant would initiate a request to a group of senior assistants to ask each one to provide a good time for their executive to connect with theirs. This would result in a messaging stream of proposed date options that could ramble on for hours, and it did - a gargantuan waste of time.
Instead, I would cut this request off at the knees, and insist that the assistant attempting to line up multiple calendars for executives should issue one phone call request, in order that each EA could get onto a call to align calendars in real time. Presto! It would take less than 10 minutes to accomplish the scheduling. Was I rewarded for my brilliant suggestion? Nope. I would be privately and personally thanked by the senior EAs for minimizing the amount of their time to get the task done, citing, "This person is driving us all crazy."
This illustrates my point that an individual with years experience is better equipped to separate the wheat from the chafe and to recommend a more streamlined approach, to achieving the same goal. Technology may crucify us but it doesn't have to, in every instance. Some forms of technology, like virtual calendars, if managed properly, are worth their weight in gold... er, that should be worth their time, to color-code meeting requests, and to group each one into categories to suit the subject-matter.
We've all had that friend who procrastinates. We've all had that friend who never shows up on time. I'm a believer in passive-aggression, not to suggest that I believe in its validity but rather to imply there are many persons out there who adopt passive-aggressive natures, and who want to be the center of attention. Apparently, this is a definition from a psychologist as to why some of our friends show up late, because they don't want to conform to society's expectations of them. Instead, they want others to conform to them. One man I know would intentionally arrive late to every get-together so I questioned his reasoning and I got my answer. "If I arrive on time all the time, everyone will expect me to be on time all the time." All of us who knew him expected him to arrive late all the time. 😅So his method worked, though not always. Whenever he had an issue, and needed your help, he expected you to drop what you're doing to help him, never mind what you had lined up in your schedule.
Time is therefore also a tool to manipulate people. Our employers do it, such as the software platform called Teams, which is pushed out by Micros*ft, prior to Skype, until Micros*ft decided to purchase Skype and re-design and re-brand it as Teams, an application that allows managers to leap tall buildings in one single jump; able to manage multiple people at once, grouped into management teams on projects, if you want to split hairs. It's most notable trait was keeping track of productivity, by way of updating an employee's work status to 'Away', if their mouse had stopped registering clicks. This is no different than treating employees as though they're children, which would then enable their manager to question where had they been? Answer: to the washroom!
I'm accustomed to busy, to be often times too busy. Where I fail is in knowing how not to be busy, to relax to the point that my lethargy doesn't faze me one bit. I still need to learn how to fully relax, and I suspect it will take me some time to develop a strategy. Maybe by the time I learn this skill, I'll be dead. 🤔
