The Modern-Day Hydra - #4
“Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.” — Oliver Burkeman
Our lives are largely defined by being busy, but does being busy equate to being productive?
The Hydra
For those unfamiliar with the story of Hercules and the Hydra, it’s a tale from Greek mythology about Hercules' battle with a seven-headed serpent. The Hydra had a unique power: when one head was cut off, two would grow back in its place. Hercules had to find another way to slay the mythical creature and get to the root of the issue.
The parallel to today’s work lies in how busyness seems to multiply when we are not focused on the right tasks.
Inbox Overload: How many times do you clear out your inbox only to have it fill back up? All you’ve done is reshuffled more work into your to-do list or increased the number of responses you'll need to write.
Procrastination on Important Tasks: How often do you handle all the easy tasks first, only to find that the harder tasks become emergencies? This just delays the inevitable, wasting time on items that could have been addressed later or not at all.
Reduce busyness by getting to the root of what needs to be done right now. Everything else can wait.
Signs of Being Too Busy
If you don’t know what the most important question is, then you are too busy. By identifying this question, you can focus your efforts more effectively.
We’ve all been there, jumping into a project with no clear sense of priorities. Best case scenario, you end up where you were ultimately going to end up. Worst case scenario (and what we see more often lately) all that work could have been avoided by simply asking, “What is the most important question I am answering with this project/task?”
Answer that first, and the rest will follow.
The Busy Trap
We have become so accustomed to always being busy that we continue the cycle day in and day out. We never take the time to reflect on what is necessary versus what is just busy work. Being busy today doesn’t mean you need to be busy tomorrow.
We fill time to feel productive, but in reality, the productive thing to do would be to allow our minds to recover.
“You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” — Amos Tversky
Every second does not need to be filled. Take a moment and pause.
Ways to Combat Busyness
Know Your Most Important Task or Objective
Create a to-do list to stay focused. Here are a few methods to try:
Daily to-do list based on projects or areas of focus.
This is my preferred method. Every day I note all my current projects. Sometimes just writing them down helps me focus on what is most important.
Determine six key tasks for the next day and rank them in importance.
Matrix: Urgent/Important, Urgent/Unimportant, Non-urgent/Important, and Non-urgent/Nonimportant.
Capture, clarify, organize, reflect, and engage.
Schedule Deep Focus Periods
Put your phone on do not disturb, block off your calendar, or set a timer to work on a specific project. Use a simple timer similar to this or the one on your phone.
Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously
Of the roughly 120 billion human beings who have ever walked this earth, that one task won’t make a monumental difference in the grand scheme of things.
Additional Resources and Thoughts:
Book: "The Creative Act: A Way of Being" by Rick Rubin
Podcast: "13 Life-Changing Ideas You’ve Never Heard Of" – Modern Wisdom #801 Listen Here
Stoicism of the Day: “We suffer more in imagination than in reality.” — Seneca
We live in a world where anxiety and stress consume a large portion of the population. What is anxiety though? It’s the fear of the unknown. Parallel to today’s broader message, we often fill our time with small, unimportant tasks, pushing out the more important and often more complex ones. Just do the hard thing. Get that monkey off your back.