The first step to dealing with overwhelming busyness in your life is to understand the season you are in.
Rachelle Crawford, an author and blogger on minimalism, says that must go beyond oversimplifying life’s seasons into childhood, adulthood, perhaps parenthood and the golden years.
“There are seasons of significant progress and seasons of paralytic waiting, seasons of painful growth and seasons of joyful celebration. There are seasons of grief and seasons of euphoria, seasons of being a child and perhaps seasons of caring for one, seasons of rigid schedules and seasons of spontaneous adventures,” she writes in her book How to be Busy.
“There are seasons that are fast-paced and overwhelming and seasons that move at a slower, steadier and more manageable pace.”
A busy season is when your calendar is more full than usual and, despite your desire for a slower pace, you’ve got too many places to be and things to do. If you find that you’re spending more time in your car than on your couch, she says, you might be in a busy season. Or if you’re secretly hoping a thunderstorm will roll in and cancel the baseball game your kid is playing tonight, that too indicates a very busy period.
Time management experts preach the value of systems but she wonders whether they live in the real world she occupies.
“What I typically end up with are practical time management strategies that look good on the outside, maybe work well in an office setting, but tend to fall apart when the first kid tests positive for the flu,” she says.
So accept your season. She recalls announcing to fellow nurses while in the last month of her pregnancy that she would start training for a triathlon. She had never participated in one but it seemed a great way to regain her body shape. A friend brought her back to reality: “No, you’re not doing that.” Wrong season.
Seasonal living involves first getting your bearings, identifying where you are, and then setting realistic expectations.
“I’m not saying that trying to manage your time well during certain seasons is a lost cause,” she says, although she acknowledges at times that may happen and you will be doing a lot of takeout dinners.
“I am saying that rather than trying to avoid, resist or resent our busy seasons when they hit, we can lean into them. Instead of merely hacking through them like a dense jungle with a machete, hoping we happen upon a clearing, we can find the calm we’re after by embracing the density in our current calendar.”
You also must expect the unpredictable. Things crop up, with sudden illnesses, a family member facing a work crisis or a child abruptly announcing help is needed immediately on a homework assignment.
“There you are, holding it all together and, out of nowhere, you’re shoulder-checked by a crisis you couldn’t possibly have accounted for,” she writes.
There is no guaranteed solution to prevent such situations. Assessing your activities by how important and urgent they are can help, she advises, but you must be willing to accept not all are truly important (or urgent), a hard instinct to break.
She also advises you to distinguish between hurry and busy. While busy is having a lot to do, hurry involves doing those things while stressed, distracted or rushed. Hurry is going through your life, whether truly busy or not, in a frenetic state.
“Nothing sucks the joy out of your day more than feeling constantly overwhelmed by your calendar, mentally drained by decision fatigue and too digitally distracted to be present for the moments that matter,” she notes.
Hurry is a state of mind. It can be affected by whether you start the day with news rather than solitude and how much of the day is given over to social media. It arises when we devote time and energy to the wrong sort of things or don’t arrange time to recover between activities.
“Busyness is an unavoidable reality from time to time, but hurry is something we can start to safeguard ourselves against,” she says.
Quick hits
- Insert 60-second brain breaks into your day, says business coach Mary Kelly. Pause for a deep breath, close your eyes and reset your mind for just one minute every hour.
- Knowing everything gets you nowhere, argues entrepreneur Pat Flynn. You’re better off with just-in-time-learning, focusing just on the information you need for the next steps in your work. Micro mastery helps, breaking skills into tiny components you can address and watch the improvements that result.
- What would happen if you had your most noxious social media apps on a device you needed to go far out of your way to use, asks entrepreneur Seth Godin?
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.