Are you busy?? – Unplug it NOW.

Recently when I visited the local grocery store, I bumped into one of my friends with whom I lost contact for close to a year. We greeted each other and I asked the question, “How is Life going?” He replied back, “Yeah! Life is fine and I am pretty busy with family, work and …..”  When he asked the same question back to me, I gave the same answer as him and since we both were busy, we waved our hands and departed. Is this not a typical dialogue that every one of us encounters in our day today life? What is the reason to call ourselves busy? Are we busy for any good reason that helps in our personal growth?  Why are we proud to say that we are busy?

Most of the time, we engage ourselves running from pillar to post doing some tasks for some reasons.  Even when we are left with some free time, we force ourselves to engage in some activities as calling a friend, watching TV, playing some online games, etc. So, we have converted our free time to busy time. Being busy has become so habitual and a part and parcel of our life. On any given day, this process continues from start of the day until we go to bed. It repeats next morning and life moves on in this busy cycle. Eventually, over a period of years, when we look back, we take a strong beat to notice that we had spent a monotonous and pretty boring life with no significant growth.

 According to research, surprisingly most of the successful people are not busy in life. They have sufficient time to do the things that they want to do. On the contrary, ordinary people are the busiest people in this planet. There are few factors associated with this type of behavior.

“Feeling of importance” is one of the strong needs of human beings. By becoming busy, we psychologically feel that we are important. Because of this fact, we feel good about ourselves. The more we want to feel important, the busier we become.

We tend to become busy when we are not clear about things. When we don’t have clarity of the things that we do, we become busy. Due to this we run every where to find out means to become clear.

Another aspect is that we are bombarded with thousands of information from external sources like internet, media, TV, friends and families and these give rise to distraction. Also, quite a lot of us can’t concentrate on single task for a prolonged period of time. Is it not common that when we are into a significant task, sometimes we intentionally divert our attention elsewhere? Maybe like going to the coffee machine, chatting with friends, watching email, texting with friends, etc.?

When we take an inventory of the activities in any particular day, it is startling to know that most of the activities are centered on unwanted unproductive trivial things of our life. All of these activities do not contribute to our personal growth. I strongly recommend each one of you who reads this post to do this inventory exercise to know exactly where we are focused in our life.

When we run our life with high speed without slowing down or reviewing the progress, it is inevitable that a defining moment comes to us where we are forced to stop this busy life. As Robin Sharma said, “One can’t simply drive a car because he is too busy to fill the gas. A moment comes where the car stops and one needs to refill the gas irrespective of whether he is busy or not “. So, it is important to stop the speed or some time it is even good to step back if one wants to move forward.

If you feel that you are into this mad rat race where there is no beginning and end then it is high time to redefine your current life. Unfortunately, we see people around us who are also into this same rat race. We all run somewhere in life not even knowing where we are all running towards. We simply run because everybody else is running in life.

How to come out of this madness of busy life?

Here are some practical answers.

1.   First, do the inventory of all the activities that you have done in the last 24 hours of your life. If you have done hundreds of activities then pick up that 5 or 6 activities that aid in your personal growth. Give less importance to all other 95 activities. Whenever you engage in any new task, see whether it helps in contributing for your growth. If so, then pick up that task. 

2. Since, we have the liking for these selected 5 or 6 tasks, our focus becomes far more better. We stop running pillar to post for execution. By narrowing down our tasks, we can train our attention muscle and by practicing this for 21 days we can permanently rewire the brain. We get a free mind and free thinking and our effort is lot more productive when there are minimum numbers of tasks on hand. We start liking the way in which this works on us and we feel good about ourselves.  Remember that others don’t like you when you don’t like yourself. Now, with the renewed perception, when you start feeling good about yourself it is common that others will naturally like you.

3. Finally, a consistent conscious engagement has the ability to shift the direction of the sign post from ‘busy’ to  ‘unbusy’. This is a great way to unplug yourself from busy life. For this, one must be constantly aware what he focuses on at any time of the day. The power of consciousness keeps one in the positive direction of growth always. I will write a separate blog just on this particular powerful strategy.

By following the above three strategies, we get a renewed way of dealing with our tasks in life in a highly productive way where we work on few things, highly focused and consciously engaged. Eventually, we become ‘unbusy’ but effective.

Oh, yes! I am proud to say that I am an ‘unbusy’ person and I welcome you to join this club. If you see a difference in your life after practicing the above strategies then please feel free to share your experience with others.

Be UNBUSY but EFFECTIVE!!