So, work is incredibly busy. You’re under pressure to deliver various projects and you feel you just don’t have the time to do X. Sometimes we focus too hard on work commitments and the excuse of being ‘too busy’ is an easy way to avoid thinking about the repercussions of our actions.
Now, the same quotation appears all over the web:
“There’s no such thing as being too busy. If you really want something, you’ll make time for it.”
In my experience this is all well and good but in reality you need a way to know that X is your priority when you are in this stressed state.
I recently heard a useful way of re-framing this to help you make this decision, it works for me when the question comes up between my work and family life. It may well work for you in other ways, so I thought I’d share it here. I heard it on a podcast but failed to note down which one, so for now it’s unattributed. I’ll update it if I can find the source.
The simple method is this:
Whenever you answer to yourself that you are ‘too busy’ to do X, simply re-frame this as X is not my priority.
For me this occasionally startles me into realising what I am doing, for example:
I’m too busy put the kids to sleep tonight.
becomes:
Putting the kids to sleep tonight is not my priority
or,
I’m too busy to stick to my diet
becomes:
Sticking to my diet is not my priority
In both the examples above I effectively did a mental double take as the re-framed sentence is certainly not true!
Hopefully this little trick will be useful on those days when the pressure is on just to help you stay on track.
Rob