SO WHAT IS THE BUSY TRAP AND HAVE YOU FALLEN INTO IT?

We’ve talked about the difference between busyness and focus/activity and action, but let’s look a little deeper at the epidemic of busyness. How come we’ve fallen prey to it and what is it doing to our focus? There are many reasons why people stay on the hamster wheel or meander through life not achieving what they want, but a common one, say psychologists, is fear.

But fear of what?

One of the keys to Real Focus is asking yourself the right questions, so an important question to start with is: what am I scared of? What is stopping me living the life I want?

Don’t be too hard on yourself though. Often the things we really want and that really matter to us are the most difficult to achieve. We need Real Focus if we’re to have a chance, but it’s a Catch 22: really focusing on our goals often means facing our fears and taking a big leap into the unknown – so what do we do? We keep busy instead, doing everything else to avoid facing our fears.

An author friend of mine once received the following message from a wannabe writer:

‘I’ve been thinking of a career in writing for 40 years, but marriage/family/social life always got in the way. Could we meet for coffee to discuss what’s involved? I’ve heard it’s hard work!’

My friend politely wrote back to say that if this woman really wanted to be a writer, she’d need to find a way of carving out the time and guarding it with her life – otherwise she’d run the risk of it never happening.

It was perhaps a rather naïve email to send and an extreme example, but that woman may genuinely have wanted to be a writer, yet have been caught in the ‘busy trap’ – for 40 years! – keeping busy, so she didn’t have to face the fear of attempting to make her dreams come true and all the possibility of failure, humiliation and financial ruin that brings.

So how can you tell whether you’re actually focused, or simply stuck in the busy trap? After all, the two can seem confusingly similar.

THE BIG GLASS JAR THESIS

We’ve established that focusing isn’t easy, that it takes, well … focus. We’ve also established that the flipside of focus is the comfort zone – or to put it another way, keeping busy to avoid facing your fears.

One way of helping yourself out of the busy trap and towards Real Focus is to do the difficult things first. To do this, we can use Mark Forster’s ‘big, glass jar analogy’:

1. First you picture a big glass jar and fill it with sand.
2. You then try to add some big stones, but find that you can’t because it’s filled with sand.
3. Instead then, you add the stones first, before adding the sand.
4. Now you’ll find that the sand fits itself around the stones.

You should take this same approach to your tasks – you should look to do the big, important stuff first and you’ll find that the other stuff will fit its way around.

ARE YOU A BUSY BRAGGER?

So, fear keeps us in the busy trap and stops us achieving Real Focus; but academics believe that cultural expectations also play a big part.

As part of writing her book, Overwhelmed: How To Work, Love and Play When No one Has the Time, Schulte met academic Ann Burnett who was studying busyness and how language creates our reality. Burnett had organized a focus group on busyness in Fargo, Dakota, near the Canadian border. As part of her studies, Burnett had collected people’s Christmas holiday letters – ones people had sent to her, as well as ones she collected from friends – and scrutinized them for language surrounding busyness. What she found was startling: the letters read as ‘brag sheets’, Burnett reported, exercises on who can sound the busiest: ‘Our schedules have always been crazy but now they’re even crazier!’ wrote one, ‘I don’t know where my time goes!’ said another. What this seemed to show was that what people were really communicating was that they had earned a badge of honour for living in fast forward.

So people actually brag about how busy they are – maybe you even do it yourself. But why? Because busyness has become a cultural expectation and, according to sociologists, human beings generally like to follow social expectations even when they don’t make sense or bring them what they really want in their lives.

What did Burnett make of the content of those letters? They demonstrate, she said, that we risk living in a state of ‘forfeiture’– a lack of self-awareness from being so distracted by the hectic busyness in everyday life.

Since we only get one life that would be a crying shame, no?

So yes, we can be a perverse lot, us humans, but the U rule completely contradicts our busy bragging! Why show off about our schedules, if they make us miserable? It’s counter-intuitive, which is why social commentators call it The Busy Trap.

“ The key to productivity is regular focused attention. If you give a project those three things, it will move. ”

Mark Forster, author and specialist in time management and organization

BUSYNESS: ARE YOU DOING IT TO YOURSELF?

Writing in the New York Times,¹ Tom Kreider made the point that the busy trap is entirely one we’ve set for ourselves for the purpose of making us feel important.

‘Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance … obviously your life cannot possibly be trivial or meaningless if you are so busy.’

However, Kreider makes the point that it’s not generally those working three jobs on the minimum wage that complain of busyness (those, he says, are not busy, they’re ‘dead on their feet, exhausted’). It’s those who organize endless activities and lessons for their children, or voluntarily take on extra work and obligations (secretary of the rugby club, rotary club social sec – anyone?). In other words, those whose busyness is self-imposed, through ambition of keeping up with the Joneses or because they ‘dread what they might have to face in its absence’.

“ The only way we can begin to see another way more clearly is if we give ourselves space. ”

Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed

It’s also well documented that the way we talk about our busyness and the language we use affects our experience of time and our perception of how ‘busy we are’ – this, sociologists call ‘evidence based bias’.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING IDLE

If busyness takes away our focus, then could it follow that idleness – doing nothing – improves it? Academics think so. This is because the ‘space’ given to us by doing nothing means we are able to think. Thinking is one of the key things that helps us to regain our thoughts and our focus, to literally ‘reset the mind’ to do what it really wants to do.

Tom Kreider² puts it like this:

‘The space … that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life … making … connections and waiting for the … strikes of inspiration – it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.’

And not just any work done, but anything important to us done: the things we want to do with our families, our ambitions and dreams. …

“ Without time to reflect … we are doomed to live in purposeless and banal busyness. ”

Ben Hunnicutt, leisure researcher

ARE YOU EVEN AS BUSY AS YOU THINK YOU ARE?

Many psychologists and academics studying this so-called ‘busyness’ epidemic would argue you’re not. For one, the numbers simply don’t add up.

Sociologist John Robinson has been studying how people spend their time for decades. In 1997 he and Geoffrey Godby wrote Time For Life for which they analysed time diary data from 1965–85. What they found was surprising.

The time diaries (where people said where their time went) did not match people’s actual time logs. People completely overstated how much they worked, and the more hours they claimed, the greater the discrepancy between their claim and the truth.

For example: People claiming to work between 50 and 54 hour weeks in their diaries overestimated by 9 hours, whereas people claiming to work 75 hour weeks, overestimated by 25. Robinson and his colleagues completed a similar study in 2011 and found exactly the same.

But hard data is not the only reason that Robinson – dubbed the ‘Father of Time’ – is generally cynical about how ‘busy’ we really are. He has plenty of anecdotal and academic research which suggests that people have a tendency to exaggerate how much they have to do and how little leisure time they have. Famously, Robinson asserts that his research proves that women, for example, have at least 30 hours leisure time per week (men have slightly more) if only they knew where to find it. And, crucially, weren’t so busy being martyrs.

A wired, exhausted, overwhelmed Brigid Schulte nearly spat out her coffee when she heard about this elusive ‘30’ hours. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’ she said. ‘I don’t have 30 hours of leisure time every week.’ Keen to challenge Robinson’s idea, she agreed to fill in what amounted to about six weeks’ worth of time diaries so that Robinson could show her where this elusive leisure time was.

So how did Schulte’s meeting with Father Time pan out? And what might it tell us about our perception of time and ultimately, how we spend it? Did he manage to find this elusive 30 hours of leisure time?

The main thing seems to be the discrepancy between what Schulte saw as leisure time and what Robinson saw.

It’s clear that Robinson has some fairly fixed ideas about how we spend our time. He maintains that we ‘exaggerate’ our work hours to show how important we are. His studies also show that we sleep more than we think we do, watch too much telly and are not nearly as busy as we seem to feel.

‘If we don’t feel like we have leisure’, he says ‘it’s entirely our fault. Time is a smokescreen. And it’s a convenient excuse,’ he told Schulte. ‘Saying I don’t have time is just another way of saying “I’d rather do something else.”’

“ When you tell people they have 30–40 hours per week of free time they don’t want to believe it. ”

John Robinson, sociologist and Director of the Americans’ Use of Time Project

The point – and the one we can take away from this – is: don’t wait for leisure time, or special moments with your kids – take them whilst they’re there. Just because a period of free time presents itself that you weren’t expecting (getting locked out, the car breaking down) doesn’t mean you can’t put it to good use. Sometimes, all it takes is a simple change in mindset. Although this sounds simplistic and basic common sense, it’s not always so easy to put into practice. How often have we chosen to feel defeated/irritated/inconvenienced by delays that could be seen as little windows of opportunity if we just flipped our mindset? How often have we said we ‘don’t have time’ for exercise or to call a friend, without thinking what we could sacrifice (half an hour extra in bed for example) in order to make it happen? A big part of being focused is giving time to thinking how you can be; being creative and having a ‘can do’ mentality.

HOW THE STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES KEEP US IN THE BUSY TRAP

It’s human nature to tell ourselves stories about our lives. It’s how we respond to challenges. Stories are comforting, that’s why we love to hear them and tell them to young children. They have a structure: a beginning, middle and an end. The danger is that these stories are not always true – but we believe them.

Before Vanderkam wrote I Know How She Does It, she wrote another book called 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think. As a result she was asked to go into organizations and talk about how people could better spend their time. She would ask women to fill in half-hour by half-hour logs of what they did for an entire week and what she saw was interesting. When people actually wrote down their whole week’s activities and events, they revealed that they had good, full, balanced lives, which involved time with their kids, husbands as well as leisure time.

It’s human nature to concentrate on the stressful moments. After all, these are what make ‘the headlines’ as Vanderkam tells it. They’re what make people laugh with recognition: ‘I was so stressed, I left the house with odd shoes on’, for example, or ‘and then my client called but my toddler was screaming blue murder in the background’. However, if we were to sit down and tell the truth, we may be surprised: we may spend more time with our kids than we think we do, more time sleeping. More time having sweet moments.

And how did they do it? Again, it comes down to simple maths: there are 168 hours in a week. If you work 50 and sleep 8 per night (56 hours per week in total) that leaves 62 hours for other things. See? Perhaps you’re not as busy as you think you are. Real focus means being truthful with yourself and not automatically believing the stories we tell ourselves that it’s ‘undoable’ or ‘all too much’ (to learn how to make a time log, see Chapter 8).

“ The time is there to ‘have it all’ if you know how. ”

Laura Vanderkam, author and speaker

WE JUST FEEL BUSIER – THAT’S THE PROBLEM

Let’s look at this concept of choice again. We have more than we ever had, about how to spend our time, what to focus our attention on, but could it be a blessing in disguise? Mark Forster is one person who thinks the increase in choices we have means we waste more time trying to make decisions and consequently feel overwhelmed. This, sociologists are calling ‘decision fatigue’, and it’s a major focus robber.

We’re not denying that too much ‘choice’ can make our lives feel more complicated, but there is another way to look at it. What about if you found ‘Real Focus’ and could make this choice work for you; that the problem could be part of the solution? It’s just working out how.

Sociologist Dalton Conley is known for his invention and coining of the word ‘weisure’ – meaning the blending of work and leisure. He does have things to say about weisure’s drawbacks (the eroding of our private and public spaces for example – more of this later), but he also invites us to look at it in a ‘cup half full’ way. Having more choice over what we can do career-wise means that often our career becomes pleasure.

Many see ‘… the “rat-race” – work bleeding into our social lives and vice-versa – as a soul-crushing choice’, he says. ‘But the truth is, many people this day and age are doing work that they find rewarding and interesting. One of the great things about weisure, if we look on the upside, is that more and more people are and can, do jobs they are passionate about and so their work becomes pleasure.’

So there you are: just another way to look at it. Rather than seeing our feelings of being overwhelmed – of one thing blurring into the other – as a bad thing, perhaps we can look at it as a bonus or an opportunity. There is more than one way to look at ‘focus’ – it doesn’t have to mean a structured, clean-cut life if that’s not ‘you’. It can also mean being wonderfully messy, as long as you’re doing as much as possible of what you love and as little as possible of what you don’t.