Are You Too Busy? Who Designed Your Life, Anyway?

Your life is what you created it to be. Being "too busy” is a fabulous excuse for avoiding making choices. If you often find yourself saying, “I’m too busy,” you might take a look at how your daily choices line up with what is truly important to you. 

How you spend your time IS the quality of your life.

I have come to see excessive busyness as clutter in the time department. We know the benefits of de-cluttering living space to create more energy and flow in the home. Does your use of time allow flow or constriction? In a cluttered home, any empty space gets filled immediately. The home feels tight and it’s difficult to breathe. With cluttered time (busyness) unassigned time is immediately filled. There’s no time to breathe or think because the next activity is right there, perhaps layered on top of another. Should even a bit of silence open up; we fill it by using the phone, radio, TV, or computer. A person with cluttered time is like a cow with a nose ring following the tug of a very demanding boss. It’s as if there is no choice.

The thing is, we do choose what we bring into our lives. Excessive busyness is a sign that inflow and outflow is out of balance. Activities are easier to acquire than to release. Do you complain about too much to do? Ask yourself; do I really choose to do this? Trace it back to the beginning. Why did I start doing this? Is it still working for me? Do I want to be that busy? Have I really used my creative thinking and all my other resources to remove, rearrange, or rethink the activities that drain me? 

Perhaps you are hoarding activity, unconsciously filling up your time. If so, you probably do it out of fear, to avoid looking inward. Intentional choosing requires that you know what you want for your life. It means being willing to take responsibility for the quality of your life, and that change can be scary. If I am too busy, I can claim to be a victim of circumstance. As a victim I avoid responsibility; there is something or someone else to blame for the prison I live in.

Perhaps you believe you stay so busy because of your desire to contribute to others. All the more reason to take really good care of yourself by staying in balance. When you are rested and centered, your work and everyone around you benefits the most. Overbooking yourself puts you into a time-debt that will carry forward into illness or low energy. 

Does it seem selfish to be choosy with your time? No, it is not selfish! When your energy is focused and you are enthusiastic, you accomplish three times as much as you do when you are frazzled or resentful. Taking care of how you spend your time IS taking care of your world. All of it!

Consider applying the closet test to your time. My organizing guru Linda tells me to ask the following question when I consider letting go of an item in my closet. Does this item lift my spirits? The idea is not to think but to go with the gut feeling. My head might say, “I have to keep that; I was so excited when I bought that sweater and I spent a lot of money on it!” While my gut is saying “I don’t like it; I feel guilty when I see it.” This item does not lift my spirits and I need to let it go. Ask this same question about each activity you do. Does this lift my spirits? Is it serving me?

With clothes, if the answer is “no,” you can send the item to a resale shop and it’s finished. With activities, the remedy may be a new behavior or a new outlook. For example, imagine I am caring for an elderly mother and I am worn down. A new behavior might be to set up a weekly exchange with a neighbor. I take her toddler to the park for her while she assists my mother for me, giving us each a break from the usual. Or it could be in a new outlook, such as focusing on each present moment with gratitude for what I have. Whether I choose a new action, a new outlook, or both, I quit being a victim of a too busy life. I have replaced an activity that had sapped my spirit with one that fills it.

So perhaps it’s time to clutter-bust your time. Cull out or reframe the activities that leave you worn out in order to enjoy and share the precious life you choose to have. Or maybe you are not ready. After all, that would take courage … and time.