Our brains give us a little hit of dopamine each time we accomplish a goal or cross a nagging task off our to-do list. (Conversely, leaving things undone means they linger in our cognitive awareness, distracting us from what we’d prefer to focus on.)
It’s natural to seek the small thrill of getting ish done. But we can resist the siren song of “busy.”
Busy is not the same as productive. In fact, they’re practically antonyms. Productivity means efficiency: achieving more output with less input. Productive means conserving resources while still reaching the desired result.
Productive is NOT multi-tasking, doing two or more things poorly and at great energetic expense. It’s not rushing from one thing to the next, or working to exhaustion, or forgoing rest and leisure.
That’s busy. Busy is inefficient. Busy is exhausting. Busy is inherently unproductive, because it involves inputting more time and energy towards a desired output.
Busy is addictive, numbing, and self-reinforcing. The busier we act, the less we can concentrate, reflect, analyze, and reorient, which are precisely the processes required for reducing our busyness and designing more productivity into our day.
And in our hustle and grind culture, busyness is seen as a badge of honor. How often do we reply “so busy!” when someone asks how we are? We use “busy” as shorthand for important, successful, valuable, when maybe it’s more appropriate to equate busy with frazzled, unfocused, anxious, or adrift.
Productivity is a laudable goal: make progress more efficiently so there’s plenty of time and energy left over. We get there by eliminating unnecessary work, batching similar tasks together, giving the task at hand our full attention, streamlining our processes, running on habitual auto-pilot for regular routines, and automating and delegating where appropriate.
It also means having a quitting time, a Do Not Disturb setting, a habit of unplugging from work and reconnecting with our interests, our loved ones, our selves. Being truly productive means our periods of work will be balanced with periods of daydreaming, downtime, and pure unadulterated boredom.
There’s value in letting our fields lay fallow.