On being busy
One of my closest friends sent me a voice note recently.
I saw it. I knew it wasn’t a casual one. She’s been going through a tough phase, and this was her reaching out… not for information, but for reassurance.
I didn’t listen to it.
Not that day. Not the next day either.
It sat there, quietly waiting, while I moved through my usual list of things to do. None of them trivial. All of them, in some way, “important.”
When I finally called her, I apologized. I was about to say, “I’ve just been busy.”
But I stopped myself. It just didn’t sound right.
There was no real excuse. It was a choice I made, and slapping it on “I was busy” didn’t cut it…even though it is a well-accepted norm.
We protect money because it’s visible and throw away time because it’s not.
If you burn money, people call you crazy. If you burn time, they call you busy.—Shane Parrish
We rarely say we’re proud of being busy.
We say it like a complaint. Like something unfortunate we’re dealing with. But if you listen closely, there’s a subtle signal of boasting underneath.
I’m busy, which must mean I’m doing important things.
I’m busy, which must mean I matter.
Busyness becomes a socially acceptable way of assigning value to ourselves.
In reality, being busy, by itself, means very little.
Ants are busy too.
Henry David Thoreau said it best: “It is not enough to be busy… the question is: what are we busy about?”
The uncomfortable truth is this: I wasn’t doing anything meaningless. I was just choosing those things over something that mattered more in that moment.
Busyness wasn’t the problem.
Unexamined busyness was.
We treat time differently from money. We budget money. We track it. We question where it goes.
Time slips through more quietly.
We fill it. We spend it. We justify it.
At the end of the day, we say, “I’ve been busy,” as if that, on its own, was a good use of the day.
A full day is not the same as a meaningful one.
A packed schedule is not the same as a well-lived one.
Being busy is not a badge. It’s a byproduct.
The real question is whether it’s a byproduct of the right things.
What are you being busy about?
If it’s what you would consciously choose, like your work, your health, your relationships, your craft…..then that busyness is aligned.
But if it’s quietly taking you away from those things, it’s not something to wear with pride.
It’s something to correct.
I still think about that voice note.
Not as a moment of failure, but as a reminder.
That time doesn’t disappear dramatically. It gets traded, quietly, choice by choice.
If we’re not paying attention, we end up being very busy… at the wrong things.