You're Not Busy. You're Hiding.

I have a client. We’re gonna call her Sharon — because I love the show Catastrophe and was just talking about Sharon Horgan this morning. If you haven’t seen Catastrophe, you need to watch it. She’s awesome. The show is awesome. But I digress.

Let’s get back to my client Sharon.

Sharon is a VP at a relatively fast-growing company. I looked at her calendar the other day and it is so colorful. Like a stained glass window that is designed by somebody who doesn’t want any breathing room. Every single block is filled. Meetings are stacked on meetings stacked on meetings. Even her focus time has somehow become a group activity.

She keeps telling me she doesn’t have time to think. And there’s just enough pride in the way she says it to make me think she doesn’t mean it the way I would expect her to mean it.

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The Con Job

You see, we’ve somehow decided that being too busy to think is proof that you’re important, instead of proof that something has gone really deeply sideways.

So I asked Sharon: “If we looked at everything on your calendar this week, how many of the things are actually moving you closer towards your goals?”

She paused for a while. Looked at her calendar. Thought about it.

Then she said: “Honestly, maybe one meeting. Everything else is just stuff.”

And there we have it.

Being busy is a con job. It makes you think you’re achieving progress. It looks productive. It feels responsible. Other people actually reward you for it. And you can end the day completely exhausted and point to that exhaustion as proof that you actually accomplished something.

But activity and progress are not the same thing.

Heck, you can walk on a treadmill for 15 minutes. That’s activity. But you’ll end up exactly where you started. There’s no progress beyond a feeling that you made progress.

Which you didn’t.

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What Busy Is Covering Up

Here’s the thing. Your busyness is probably covering something you don’t want to confront.

That’s okay. Everybody does it.

Maybe it’s that important project you keep getting ready to begin. Or the decision you’ve been avoiding for a month. And of course there’s always that conversation you keep rescheduling because the timing isn’t quite right — which is fascinating, because apparently the right time is a day after never.

Busy is usually what we do instead of the thing we’re actually afraid to do.

Being busy is also an amazingly convenient form of avoidance because it actually comes with compliments. No one questions the person who’s slammed at work. We admire them. We call them committed. We tell them we don’t know how they do it.

Meanwhile, the thing that matters most keeps getting kicked down the road.

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The Kayak Question

If you want to know what your busyness might be hiding, I have a question for you.

If you decided tomorrow to circumnavigate the world by kayak — no phone, no laptop, no opportunity to send your team a quick thought, nothing to do but keep paddling and don’t get eaten by the sharks — what on your calendar would still move forward in a good enough way without you?

Think about that.

And then pay attention to whatever discomfort or defensiveness you feel.

This is actually better if I ask you in person. But I want you to actually do it yourself and pretend I’m there. You probably have a lot of reasons why your situation is different and you’re actually needed.

That reaction is exactly what I want to talk about.

Let me explain.