What If You Weren’t Busy

You are the busiest person I know, my best friend told me once. You seem to thrive on it.

She was right, and I knew it.

Quiet unsettled me.

Stillness made me uncomfortable.

I’m an achiever, so every minute owes me something and I am forever collecting that debt.

Ask most people how they are doing today, and you often hear the same word back: busy, but good! It has become a greeting or a badge. Our culture rewards this pace, and our workplaces do too. So, we wear this badge—proudly—or maybe we wear it because we don’t know who we would be without it.

The busy narrative isn’t just about our schedules. It is an identity. And identities are costly to keep up.

Back when I was in my 20s, I took a sabbatical once as part of a program my workplace had. And I had also 12 weeks of maternity leave when I had my son.

Both times, by the last two weeks, I was climbing the walls.

I had a life that was chock full, and when time finally opened up in front of me, wide and expansive, it terrified me.

I filled up the silence as fast as I could. Busy wasn’t just a habit for me—it was how I kept from having to sit still with myself.

You can spot anyone caught in this same dynamic from a mile away. These are the people around you that are always tapping on their phones. They are always rushing from one thing to the next. They are rarely, if ever, in the now.

Maybe, like me, you have been one of those people?

I have carried a low hum of running-out-of-time most of my life. My awareness of the clock and the calendar is a dark shadow that hangs over me at times.

So, I spend a lot of energy wishing I could stop time. Freeze my son at a young age. Hold myself at this version of me.

But maybe this isn’t the best strategy. Maybe our work isn’t to pause time. Maybe the work is to pause in it.

A while back, I started blocking off 12:00 to 1:00 in Outlook every day and called it RECESS (in all caps). I used to call it LUNCH, but LUNCH was too easy to skip—I would eat at my desk, give away the time block to something else, and tell myself I would take a break another day.

RECESS, on the other hand, is harder to bulldoze your way through. There’s something about the energy behind it that won’t let me.

It’s not legal to cancel recess, right?

I am learning.

A colleague looked at my calendar online recently trying to schedule something with me, and she told me she was horrified by how full it was. But I told her that what she saw was not just work. I block WRITING time and AIRTIME before 8:00 a.m. I block out time for TENNIS and YOGA. I block lunches with friends. And then work fills in around all of that.

Here’s what I have finally figured out: I can manage a very heavy workload as long as I carry an equally heavy fun load alongside it.

The fun balances out all those long days on Zoom—and those months of having to fly somewhere for work every week.

So yes, I'm still super busy.

But busy feels like a different animal when the twelve hours are stitched through with lightness, and joy, and other people.

What might you say next time when someone asks how you are doing?

If you don’t answer, “busy,” what would you say?

And who would you be?

I have finally learned we get to choose the story we tell about our own time. And the day we stop telling the busy story is the day a different story gets to begin.

What are you waiting for?

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