Summary

  • One of the deepest human needs is to feel important.

  • Feeling “busy” can validate this need, but also be a symptom of something deeper: distraction.

  • Your mind doesn’t actually crave rest, it craves change. Novelty and distraction feed the craving.

  • Defeating distraction can earn you 2-3 hours back per day.

The psychology of “busy”

When you imagine a busy person, what do you visualize? Is it:

  • A well-dressed, briskly-walking NYC executive commanding a conversation on his or her smartphone? [bonus busy points: on speaker phone!]

  • The desk-bound disheveled professor rifling through documents in their bunker of books?

  • The employee who responds to Slack messages at 11pm and 1am?

  • A tech executive with 9 hours of back-to-back meetings who’s booked out 2-3 weeks?

Credit: Bob Mankoff, The New Yorker Collection

One of the deepest human needs is to feel important. That we matter. That there is meaning to our finite life of a mere 4,000 weeks.

One way to show the world we matter is that our time is scarce. If demand for our time is greater than our supply of it, guess what: our value goes up! As a result, we feel needed—significant, even. That’s a good feeling.

What is demanding our time?

Most folks have about 17 waking hours to play with each day. This assumes 7 hours of sleep. So until Neuralink or Kernel can tax our consciousness while sleeping, let’s assume the typical human day looks like this:

Kudos to you if you get more than 7 hours of sleep.

Let’s focus on our 17 waking hours, say 6am-11pm. That’s a fairly long day, but not uncommon among the tech executives I’ve talked to and worked with. Okay, where is the 17 hours going?

The traditional answer would look something like this:

But we know life doesn’t fit neatly into these buckets. Therefore, this chart is bullshit. It doesn’t account for:

  • Distraction

  • Actual (deep) work

For example, we know most people spend 2.5 hours on social media per day (5x more than the recommended 30min from the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology). So right off the bat, the lines between leisure time (green) and work (blue) are smearing like my daughter’s watercoloring.

And within the work (blue) slice of the pie, even the most indistractable knowledge workers can only achieve 3-4 hours of actual work (source: Asana). Let’s refresh our chart:

This chart is a bit more honest:

  • We probably get about 4 hours of real work done each day.

  • The other 5 hours of work are admin/synaptic/bullshit meetings.

  • We’re probably on our phones more than we’d like to admit (~3 hours).

And this chart assumes a very generous 2 hours for both meals and errands/obligations.

So are we really that busy?

I’d argue NO. We aren’t truly that busy, but we feel busy because the green (social media et al) and dark blue (fake work) are crowding our consciousness—for 8 hours a day! It also presents somewhat of a conundrum to confront our alleged faux-busyness because, as mentioned, it feels good to be needed.

Similarly, the person who says “I don’t have time to meditate!” is often the person who needs it most.

How to defeat distraction

One of the best books on this topic is Nir Eyal’s Indistractable. He aptly points out that the opposite of distraction isn’t focus, its TRACTION, i.e. making genuine progress on the task or goal at hand.

Distraction is often mistaken for a disease when it is actually a symptom. Beneath the distracted person’s behavior is a stark inability to control our own emotional triggers and impulses.

Specific tactics to combat distraction:

  1. Meditation: start with 20 minutes per day 3 times per week. Think of it as brain training: teaching you mind to be be calm is like teaching your dog to sit.

  2. Timeboxing: blocking your calendar with distraction-free focus time

  3. Journaling: start with 5 minutes per day 3 times per week. Writing out your thoughts and feelings can be incredibly therapeutic—and fun! I use the LIFE method for journaling. Also a great way to reflect on how you felt right before you got distracted to bring awareness to emotional triggers.

  4. Pacts: make little deals to reduce distractions, e.g. giveaway $50 for each missed workout, find an accountability buddy via Focusmate, use StayFocused chrome extension to block time-wasting websites.

  5. Smartphone lojack: delete bullshit apps, turn off all notifications unless human-generated and absolutely necessary; move addictive apps into a folder off-home-screen.

  6. Self-care: yes, the basics—healthy diet, moderate vice, half-your-bodyweight in ounces of H2O per day, 8 hours of sleep, etc.—but also spending times with friends and family to feel connected as the social animals we are.

    1. Remember: Loneliness and social isolation worsen the burden of stress, and often produce deleterious effects on mental, cardiovascular and immune health (Haslam

      et al., 2018).

  7. Plan the next day: I have yet to instill this habit myself, but I’ve heard from dozens of successful leaders that they plan/prioritize the following day and the end of the current day. This allows them to start the following day with laser-focused intention.

Consciousness cornucopia

For the brave few that summon the courage to cross-examine their own “busyness,” the rewards are plentiful:

  • Time: 2-3 hours back per day

  • Objectivity: the ability to step off the treadmill and observe our habits impartially

  • Tranquility: antifragile temperance and inner calm amidst life’s chaos

Busy, busy, busy

Calm, calm, calm