Bragging about how busy you are is not the best way to present yourself

Have you ever been guilty of this..."humble-bragging" about how busy you are, how little sleep you receive, how stressed your work makes you? I have. But really, it's not wise to advertise your lack of resources or inability to effectively delegate or manage time. 


As an independent consultant, I have learned to appreciate the occasional quiet times between contracts. These allow me room to do the administrative things before and after jobs, learn something new, update my time allocation and bookkeeping, and it provides a little work/life balance....albeit in sometimes unexpected ways.  

Living and working at the speed of business in the last 20 years has seen an ever-growing expectation to to more, faster, with less.  This has become such a mantra that many employees and entrepreneurs alike have shouldered this to mean that if their day is not 100% absolutely filled and accounted for, they are somehow lacking.  This is a result of what Jim Collins calls "the undisciplined pursuit of more".  I refer to it as "much of a muchness" - busy-ness for the sake of appearing busy, regardless of whether the efforts you are busying yourself with have any real value.  

The good news is that there is an antidote to this, and Greg McKeown of Harvard Business Review calls this the Essentialist Movement. This movement consists basically of evaluating all of that which keeps you "busy", and stripping away what is not essential.  Key tips, which seem intuitive enough, include:

1. Rest well to excel.
2. Add expiration dates to activities - new and old - to filter out those that you wish to keep as traditions, and those you with to experience for the sake of experiencing them. 
3. Say no occasionally.  It will make your Yes that much more vibrant.  
4. Eliminate empty "busy-ness" from your life.
5. Move from the mindset of continuous "More" to one of "more of what matters". 

So how about you?  Have you found insight into ways to stop doing meaningless busywork?  Granted some of that is unavoidable...but the more attentive we are to what we are doing, the more effectively we can manage that work. 

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