The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur

July 13Not Very Busy

They make a great ado nowadays about hard times; but I think that the community generally take a wrong view of the matter. This general failure, both private and public, is rather occasion for rejoicing, as reminding us whom we have at the helm,—that justice is always done. If our merchants did not most of them fail, and the banks too, my faith in the old laws of the world would be staggered … It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?

Henry David Thoreau—Familiar Letters (1865)

British scholar C. Northcote Parkinson coined the phrase, “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” The proverb is so accurate it became known as Parkinson's law.

Busy? What are you busy about?

Here's the problem with busy in the words of the Roman philosopher Seneca:

No one pursuit can be successfully followed by a man who is preoccupied with many things … since the mind, when distracted, takes in nothing very deeply, but rejects everything that is, as it were, crammed into it. There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living: there is nothing that is harder to learn.

Our constant multitasking makes it impossible to have a deep, meaningful relationship with anything, including ourselves.

Busy is a habit, that's all it is. Your job is to break it and take back what means the most to you. Your job is to figure out what's meaningful in each day, and it's probably not scanning Facebook. Then, of course, ...