Beyond Busyness

Time Wisdom in an Hour

Stephen Cherry

• Publisher: Sacristy Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781908381132
• eBook ISBN: 9781908381637
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Time Management

Following the success of his previous book, Beyond Busyness: Time Wisdom for Ministry, Dr Stephen Cherry has distilled the essence of Time Wisdom into this bite-sized book, essential for anyone seeking to restore some balance in their busy life.

As part of his "Give up busyness for Lent" campaign – or as a standalone guide – this concise book will help you get to grips with Time Wisdom in just an hour!

Why give up busyness?
You might just find you get more done...

Busyness has become a disease.
The developed world is suffering from an epidemic of major proportions, and the disease at the heart of it is busyness. We are addicted to doing one thing after another with as little down-time as possible. This is a sickness, a spiritual sickness.

Why is busyness so bad?

• It distorts your perception
• It makes you feel self-important
• It makes you rude
• It's an excuse for impatience
• It's an excuse for not getting things done
• It's addictive
• It burns you out
• It's lazy – chronic busyness occurs when you have not asked the important questions or decided on your priorities

Learn Time Wisdom in an hour and get your life back!

Part 1: Before You Begin

Okay, you are busy, so let’s not waste any time on an introduction.

Spend no more than two minutes looking down the following list and decide which of these statements apply to you:

• I often feel that there is not enough time.
• I often work more hours than I should.
• Days off can feel as if they are adding time pressure.
• My family miss out on my time because of other demands.
• I spend too much time on admin.
• I do not take all of my holiday entitlement.
• I wish I had fewer meetings.
• I sometimes realise too late that I have missed a great opportunity.
• Time pressures make it difficult or impossible for me to live up to my own expectations as a warm and caring person.
• When people say, “how are you?” I often reply, “busy”.

So, how many of these apply?

If it is five or more . . . Bingo! This book is for you.

Part 2: “New Busy” or “The Busyness Syndrome”

I can’t say exactly when it happened, but at some point in recent years the word “busy” changed its meaning. Once upon a time it meant, “I have rather more to do at the moment than usual, and I am not sure whether I am going to get it all done – but that’s all part of the fun of life”. Those were the days when the word “busy” had a smile on its face. Today “busy” has lost its smile and its meaning is more ambiguous. This book is not designed to eliminate the experience of busy from your life. It is designed to put a smile back on the face of busy.

In order to do that we need to say more about what the word “busy” has come to mean.

Have you noticed how many people give you the answer “busy” when you ask them how they are or how things are going? Similarly, have you spotted that people now use the word “busy” both as a positive, even boastful, self-description (“look at me, I’m busy”), and yet at the same time hint that as they are busy they deserve a little of your sympathy? Today, the word “busy” wants to have its cake and eat it too.

Even worse, “busy” has become an excuse. It is used in such a way as to give the speaker an alibi for anything they have not done or do not intend to do. So when asked about something they promised to do people say something like, “I am sorry I have not done that [the word is weighted with a little implicit disdain] but I have been very busy”.

What you are not allowed to say in response is, “I’m very sorry to hear that you have been busy, but I thought we agreed that this would be a priority for you”.

If you did say it, this is perhaps how the conversation would develop:

“Oh, yes it was,” says the busy person, “but there were so many things . . . I can’t go through them all. I really was just too busy. But I will get on with it now, as the deadline is so close.”

“The deadline has in fact passed”.

“Well I will definitely get on with it then.” (Thinks: “this is what is going to make me busy today. How exciting!”)

You get the picture.

Another aspect of the new busy is that it applies as equally to leisure activities as it does to jobs that need to be done—whether at work or at home. The new busy does not respect the distinction between essential and desirable. This is one reason that the “two-column To Do list” (which will be explained in section 6) can be such an effective weapon against busyness syndrome. It is also why people can be busy on holiday or on their days off. They really want to squeeze in the extra round of golf and are determined to get the children to yet another activity. Then they go and spoil it all by calling it “busy”.

Some of the worst culprits for living lives of leisure but describing themselves as busy are the retired, or at least those who have been retired long enough to be able to say “I don’t know how I had time to go to work” or “I have never been busier”. We have all heard these comments, but few would dare to say, “ahem . . . I wonder how much of that busyness has the primary objective of enjoyment”. Not a wise comment to make to your elders, perhaps, but if we invariably fail to challenge some of the uses to which the word “busy” is put today, then we will be colluding with the toxic effect it is having on our lives.

When people who live leisured lives begin to describe themselves as busy we know that something sinister has happened. A cultural line has been crossed and values have been reshaped. We have entered the unhealthy territory of the new busy; we are in the grip of the busyness syndrome.

Old Busy	New Busy
Episodic	Chronic
Fuelled by the unexpected	Driven by the unmanageable
Exciting adrenalin rush	Exhausting adrenalin overload
One of those things	A source of pride, identity even
Product of events	Product of attitude
A genuine explanation given with regret and sincere apology	A ready-made excuse for not doing things
Could be minimised by better time management	Aggravated by time management

Figure 1: Table highlighting key differences between “old busy” which is a passing and transitional phase, and “new busy” which is a relentless state driven by internal as much as external factors.

The new busy, then, is a way of life in which people are driven by unmanageable demands. It is not an occasional state caused by a sudden change in circumstances or the onset of a specific crisis. It is a chronic condition, a disease. As soon as one thing goes, another replaces it. Whereas “old busy” would give us an adrenalin rush that would spice life up a bit, “new busy” exhausts us because we start to live off the adrenalin (or its tasty substitute, caffeine) and feel listless, wretched, pointless and mildly (or seriously) depressed when not being hyperactive.

In his short story Crazy Busy, Julian Boote paints a picture of social, ethical and civic breakdown caused by a time management application which goes viral. [1] This huge engine of productivity delivers highly satisfying rewards to people as they complete their next bit of work within an impossibly demanding deadline. They love it and inevitably get addicted. In no time at all people are transformed from happy workers to compulsive deadline-achievers. The pleasure of reward has morphed into the threat of non-reward. This is work-aholism cubed and it is the product of the most highly developed and efficient time management tool imaginable—a tool which treats people as machines and forgets about their deeper needs and resources. Time is treated like...

Table of contents

• Part 1: Before You Begin
• Part 2: “New Busy” or “The Busyness Syndrome”
• Part 3: Two Ironies
• Part 4: Time Wisdom
• Part 5: Two Types of Time
• Part 6: Why Give Up Busyness?
• Part 7: What does NOT BUSY mean?
• Part 8: Time is a Spiritual Issue
• Part 9: How?
• Part 10: Tips on Implementing the Ten Top Tips
• Part 11: A Non-Busy Life
• Part 12: It’s Micro-Party Time
• Part 13: Finally
• Endnotes