Jay Papasan:
I’m Jay Papasan, and this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.
Hey, gang. Jay Papasan here. This week, we’re going to talk about busyness. Busyness is this state where we’re doing lots of stuff that may not amount to very much. This episode’s for you if you’re a little bit like me. You’re kind of a tasker. I’ve been called a tasker by my partner, by my wife, by more people than I care to count. And a lot of times I’m kind of proud of it. I’m kind of a doer. I like to be in action mode.
A lot of times my wife and I will try to get away for the weekend. We have a small property just north of Austin. It’s our little ranch. And instead of hanging out on the porch, sipping a frothy beverage, and reading a great novel, almost every single time I’ll be like, “Well, maybe I should mow some grass with a tractor. Maybe I should chop some wood. Maybe I should fire up that chainsaw.” And I have lots and lots of justifications for it. Like, “The ranch needs the work. It needs to be done,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, “I’m going to be the responsible owner of the ranch.”
Or I sometimes will rationalize it, “Hey, I deal with words.” When you’re making podcasts and you’re writing books, you can spend all day, and there’s no physical representation of your work. You go out and mow the lawn, you get to see every square foot of change that you created. So, it’s rewarding work, is the rationale I’ll say.
But it’s actually a bit of a trap as well. If you’re constantly busy, there are actually three costs, at least three costs that I’ll talk about today in this episode. I’ll also explain why people like me and maybe you, fall prey to the busyness trap. There’s some really good psychology around our adversity to, “We just don’t like to be sitting still.” There’s lots of reasons for this. And finally, I’ll kind of share a couple of things that you might implement in your life to kind of escape the busyness trap. So, without further ado, I want to dive into this episode for my fellow taskers out there in the world. And we’ll start with the cost of busyness.
When I think about the cost of busyness, there’s three things that immediately come to mind. People who are in a constant state of busyness kind of suffer from more stress. They tend to kind of have less emotional empathy for those around them. They’re not as emotionally available, kind of less humane in general. And finally, they make less progress on their priorities. So I’ll kind of break them into each of their little buckets as we go here.
So first and foremost, more stress. Well, that seems pretty obvious. If you’re always doing stuff, you’re always kind of harried. We talk about being tormented by our to-do list. There’s always things that we can add to it. And it feels like it never gets truly shorter. If you are a tasker, you can always find tasks to do. If you need to be busy, you can always find activities to do. And there’s this great quote that I’m going to read from Dr. John Delony. And I believe he’s part of the Dave Ramsey team. My coach, Jordan Freed, is the first person who shared it with me. But it reads like this, “If busyness is your drug, rest will feel like stress.”
If busyness is your drug, rest will feel like stress. Does that resonate with you? It kind of was a cheap shot to me. I was like, I can’t believe my coach just told me that. It felt like a punch in the gut because it’s kind of true. If you really have put your identity into all the doing that you do, well, who are you when you’re at rest? A lot of our culture rewards this, right? We want to have lots to do. We want to tell people, “Hey, what are you up to?” Well, I’m busy right now, right? That’s great. My number one favorite excuse if I want to get off the hook for something, “Sorry, I can’t do that. I’m busy.” And our culture rewards this.
The problem with that is if you’re always hurried and harried, you’re never allowing yourself to rest and recuperate, right? You’re never giving yourself the downtime that you need to charge up. And here’s the truth. If you don’t ever have any scheduled or regular downtime, you will have downtime and it will be unscheduled. It’s called a breakdown. And we see it again and again, especially for our busy leaders and our busy entrepreneurs that are a part of the greater tasker family. They go into this thing, and then eventually they hit burnout because they just tasked themselves into a very deep hole that they can’t get out of. The stress eventually will shut them down and they can’t move on.
So, first and foremost, you need to avoid busyness because it will increase your stress. And we wrote about this in The ONE Thing, you need to be doing fewer things for more effect instead of doing more things with side effects. And that was kind of the short pithy way of saying everything that I just said. If you do fewer things that are more impactful instead of loading up your calendar and then suffering from the effects of it, that’s definitely a better way to live.
Now, let’s talk about this loss of empathy, our emotional unavailability to those that we love. How in the world is that connected to this idea of busyness? Well, hopefully this is not too much of a stretch, but we wrote about this in the book. And there is the study of the Good Samaritan study. It took place in the ’70s. It was at Princeton and I believe I’ll read, make sure I get this right. John Darley and Daniel Batson were the principal researchers. They got a whole bunch of seminary students at Princeton to participate in an experiment. And they were told to come to this one place. And then, they were given one of three assignments. And the basic assignment was the same. They were told to go to another location and deliver a sermon on the Good Samaritan.
And I’m going to hit the pause button there. If you’re not familiar with the parable of the Good Samaritan, it is a story, a biblical story about the importance for good people to stop and help strangers in need, right? And so the basic moral of the story that they’re going to go give a sermon on is we should, as good people, help those in need, especially strangers.
Okay. So, the three different variations were, “Hey, you need to go deliver this sermon on the Good Samaritan and you’re a little early, so you can kind of take your time,” or “You need to go deliver this. And if you leave now, you’ll be on time.” And then, the third group was actually told, “If you leave now, you better rush because you’re probably going to be late.”
And so you can imagine that last group, they’re like, “Oh, is that going to impact my grade?” Off they go to deliver a sermon about something that every good seminary student probably knows by heart. Well, what they didn’t know is between the building they started in and the building where they were going to deliver their sermon, there was a collaborator with the researchers. All of the seminary students had to traverse an alley about four feet wide, and in it, was another researcher who appeared to be a stranger in distress, unconscious laying across the pathway.
Now, here’s where the results get interesting. When people are busy tasking, they’re in a rush, it really impacts whether or not they’re going to do the right thing. So, 63% of the people that were told they were early stopped and helped a stranger. There’s a part of me that still questions what the other 40% or 37% were doing, that they didn’t stop given that they had time and this topic should have been front and center. But needless to say, 63% of them did. Of those who were on time, a little less than half of them stopped to help a stranger. And the one that really stands out for those that were in a rush.
Now, for our taskers out there, if you’re constantly moving from the next thing to the next thing, this is your natural condition. You walk fast, you talk fast, you move fast, you take action, because that’s what taskers do. That’s how you check off all those things on your list. Now, only 10%, one in ten of seminary students that were rushing to do their assignment actually stopped to render aid. Now, let’s put that another way. Nine out of ten seminary students on their way to talk about the importance of the Good Samaritan principle failed to actually help a stranger in need.
So, you have to ask the question, if nine out of ten seminary students who are rushing, busy, fail to do the right thing, what’s the cost in our lives? When we’re tasking through our days, how are we showing up for our teammates, for our loved ones, for our family? You may not want to go there, but when we’re perpetually busy, not only do we not always do the right thing, our empathy meter is low because we’re focused on tasks, not people. We also just miss it.
I mean, I bet that there were some of those seminary students that never had the chance to help because like some guy walking down Madison Avenue, looking at a cell phone and stepping right onto traffic, like they were focused on something else entirely. And they just didn’t notice that they were stepping over a human being in distress, but that can actually be damaging as well.
So, first and foremost, you have this idea that busyness elevates our stress. We get no relief. And the second cost, we have this human cost. We don’t have the empathy. We’re not emotionally available, right? We’re less humane in some ways. And then, we’ll get to the final cost. And I’m not saying this is actually the definitive cost of busyness. I actually think if we thought about this longer, got into a debate with my coach, I bet we could come up with five or six other costs, but these are the big ones that came to my mind after teaching this book for more than a decade.
The last one is we lose progress on our real priorities. The fundamental thing about busyness is that we’re using busyness as cover. There’s a great quote by Tim Ferriss, the podcaster and author of the Four-Hour Work Week that I love, and I keep it front and center. “Being busy is a form of laziness, lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.” Do you hear that? “Being busy is the form of laziness, lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.” When I am confronted with a student, with a coaching client, with a corporate client that has a to-do list, literally a mile long, one of the first questions I kind of know to ask myself is, what is this person hiding from?
Busyness is a place to hide because we can look like we’re productive people because of all the activity, right? We’ve got a wake of dust in our behind us, right? We’re doing all of these things and it looks very important. We have to move fast. We have to talk fast. All of the things give the illusion of a highly successful, productive person or company. But under that might be someone who is tasking away without ever really addressing their priorities.
So, one of the fundamental ideas, and frankly – this predates The ONE Thing with Gary Keller, we actually wrote about it in our very first book, The Millionaire Real Estate Agent – activity and productivity are different things. Activity is doing stuff. Productivity is acting on your priorities. The moment we change all of this action and aim it at things that actually matter, the nature of our work changes and our work begins to matter itself.
So, if you try to do everything, you probably aren’t going to accomplish not very much, and you’ll do a mediocre job at it. So, as we wrote in The ONE Thing, activity is often unrelated to productivity. Busyness rarely takes care of business itself. Now, there’s this other idea. All of that action, right, doesn’t actually amount to much. We’ve all had those days. You run from meeting to meeting, Zoom meeting to Zoom meeting. And at the end of the day, if someone asks you, how was your day? You may not be able to add up that you accomplished very much. You did a lot, but accomplished little. The other side of this is when we’re constantly in motion, we don’t ever get to sit back and consider what we are doing and what we should be doing.
And there’s a quote by one of my favorite writers, a guy named Shane Parrish. I’ve been reading him on the Farnam Street blog for, gosh, over a decade. Brilliant thinker, and he’s all about decision making. And I’m going to have to read this because that’s a longer quote, but it’s one of those that I keep around. “You can tell how good someone is at making decisions by how much time they have. Busy people spend a lot of time correcting poor decisions, so they don’t have time to make good decisions. Good decisions need good thinking, and that requires time.”
That’s a really big idea. When we short-circuit our thinking by doing all the time, leaving no space for perspective, for stepping back. As Keith Cunningham, the author would say, “You need thinking time, entrepreneur, so you do less stupid stuff.” When we don’t do that, we fill with all of these tasks, we tend to make poor decisions, we tend to execute poorly. And that means you may be living in the lands of do-over and redo, right, because your original work wasn’t good enough, or it was aimed at the wrong thing, or in the wrong direction, or at the wrong person. And all of that work kind of creates a negative snowball effect. The poor decisions and the poor work create more work, which gives us even less time to sit back and ask the question, what should we be doing, and how should we be approaching it? So, boom, all three costs can add up.
When we’re really busy, it increases our stress, which is very unhealthful in the long term. It’s one of the reasons we tell people the very first thing we time block is our time off, right? If you’re going to do extraordinary things, you’re going to need downtime to rest and recuperate. It can cost us some of our humanity, right? This idea that when we’re rushing to and fro, we don’t notice the people who need our help, and we’re less likely to give it if we do.
And then, finally, we’re just not making progress on the stuff that matters. We’re doing lots of stuff that doesn’t add up, even if it takes up all of our calendar and all of our time and steals time from the true priorities. And then, to kind of compound that, all of that doing leaves us very little space to dream. It gives us very little space to consider, to have perspective. So, we end up redoing and doing lots of do-overs, which is kind of a negative compounding effect.
So, if you’re like me, a tasker, you’re like, “Okay, I kind of intellectually know all of this stuff. Like, how do I stop? How do I hit the unplug button? How do I at least hit pause so I can be a little better?” Well, I’ve thrown a lot at you. We’re going to take a really quick break. And on the flip side, I’m going to very quickly explain with a great psychological study I got from one of my friends, Anne Loehr at Ness Labs. I want to ask the question, why do we fall prey to this? Because the first step to getting around something, one, we have to know the cost, we have to understand it, why is this happening to us, and then I can provide you with a couple of solutions. I’ll see you on the other side of the break.
All right, welcome back. We’ve covered the cost of busyness. Now, let’s talk a little bit about why we fall prey to it. And so as I mentioned, I’ve been a big reader of Ness Labs. I’ve become friends with the founder, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, brilliant researcher, brilliant writer. And she’s written about the subject before. And she shared some research about how there is a great aversion to idleness. And I kind of want to unpack this for you.
So, the research was conducted at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and also Shanghai, and I don’t know how to say this, I think it’s Jiao Tong University, their Antai School of Management. So, two schools of management, those joint research, they were studying the impact of idleness on our decision making.
So, they took about 100 college students, and they said that you’re going to do two surveys with some space in between. And so, they were asked to come in and take a survey, a confidential survey about their university. And at the end of it, they were told, the next survey won’t be ready for you for another 15 minutes. So, done the first task, now I have 15 minutes, what will I do at that time? They were told they were, they could not have cell phones or books or anything else to do, but they were given a choice. They could turn in their existing survey right around the corner, and then return and just wait for 15 minutes or they could deliver it to another spot on the university that was about a 15 minute round trip. Meaning, if they were busy and just went and did the thing, by the time they were done, it would be time to do the next task, no idle time. And they experimented with several versions of this.
Everybody who delivered their first survey was given a chocolate. They were given the same chocolates, either milk chocolate or dark chocolate. And then, they started mixing it up. They told some people, like if you do it right around the corner, that is the idle option, because they would have to sit for 15 minutes, you get this chocolate. But if you go across the university, where you would have the busy choice, right, you would be busy the entire time, you got this other chocolate.
And it’s not like people were being offered two crazy different choices, right? A Hershey’s bar versus, you know, Easter Peeps, which I personally do not like very much. I know some people are big fans. It wasn’t like that. They actually randomized it such that the choice of chocolate didn’t matter at all. What mattered is whether someone could justify artificially why they were making the choice to either be idle or be busy. So, they zeroed out the cost of the chocolate.
And here’s kind of what the final results were. So when you look at the choices, those that were given the same choices, only about 30% of them chose to do the busy method. The rest of them chose the easy one because without any justification, why would I do the extra work, right? That was the rationale of the researchers. When they had a justification, even though it was not a real one, just a choice of candies, chocolate or this chocolate, dark chocolate or milk chocolate, whatever it was, some rationale, 59% chose the busy option. So, almost twice as many people would choose to be busy if they could rationalize why that made sense.
Now, I’m going to hit pause there. This is me at the ranch. “Oh, this is work that’s gratifying. Look, I can see the work I’ve done. It’s physical work,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever. I mean, I recognize that immediately. Give me a justification and a reason to be busy and I’ll choose to be busy. The last thing they did, that extra survey was actually a way to quickly capture how happy or unhappy they were. They were asked, how do you feel about the last hour of your work? And they were on a one to five scale where one was, I’m pretty miserable. And five was, I’m pretty darn happy.
Well, regardless of whether they chose the idle option or the busy option, right, or the chocolates were in plate or not, the people who chose the busy option, who chose to be busy were measurably happier than those who had to sit idle. And so, at the end of the day, the research is like, well, “What does all this mean? It’s not about chocolates. It may not even about choosing to be busy.” Their actual research conclusion says, “Our research suggests that many purported goals that people pursue may merely be justifications to keep themselves busy.” They actually concluded that people want to avoid being still and everything was just a justification to be busy.
So, think about that for a second. We’re all out there. We’re taking on all these tasks. We’re saying yes to all of this stuff. Is it all really to avoid just being still? Is it all just so that we can be in motion rather than be still? Is that really a lost art today? It may be. I know that I know so many entrepreneurs, so many leaders, so many founders that suffer under the trap of busyness. They need to be perpetually in motion. They feel completely uncomfortable to be still. People hate being idle, especially entrepreneurs and achievers.
The mathematician, Blaise Pascal – and if I’ve butchered that, I’m sorry, but that’s how this southerner was taught to say his name – he said once that, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” The reason I know that quote is because it kind of spoke to me. Like, what does it mean to sit still with your own thoughts, to sit still with your own emotions, to have to consider our existence? Maybe there’s a biological reason but there is an aversion to it. And that last study pointed to why so many people, when they give an even the flimsiest of justification, will choose busy over being idle.
Whereas idle, that’s a negative term, right? You’re idle, right? Idle hands are the devil’s playthings, whatever that quote is. I always mess them up. But there’s like this wisdom quote in the world that idleness is probably a bad thing. And we venerate people who are busy. But the real key here is not about whether idleness is bad. Being still, being present is actually a good thing, right? Being able to rest and recuperate is a good thing. Being able to sit back and think rather than do and get perspective to think about how to approach our problems and which problems we should approach, those are all good things. And when we label them as idleness, we immediately put them in the kind of bad category, right? That’s the stuff that we shouldn’t be doing.
So, we have to kind of reprogram our brains around this. Our culture doesn’t celebrate downtime. And we don’t really know what to do with it. So, there’s the best explanation I’ve seen for why so many people fall for this busyness trap. Busyness helps us avoid idleness. And this thought of, “What do I do now? What do I do when I have nothing to do?” seems to be a question most people really struggle to ask and answer.
So, let’s get to the end of this. What do we do with all this information, Jay? We’ve talked about the cost. We kind of now understand that all of this busyness isn’t about the doing. It’s about avoiding not doing. It’s about being alone with ourselves. It’s about this idleness. So how do we kind of prescribe a path forward so that we can be better and maybe avoid busyness for business sake?
So first and foremost, I would say it’s the mantra around here, prioritize your work. If it’s work you’re looking at, if you’re going to have to be “busy,” let’s make it about work that’s actually productive. Take time to prioritize the things that are on your to-do list. Go from a to-do list, as we would say, into a success list. And if you’re beginning your busy days by actually working on your priorities, you’ll actually be a productive person versus someone masquerading as one. Someone hiding from their priorities.
A lot of busy people are doing the little stuff because they’re kind of afraid of the big stuff. And it’s not that they’re afraid that they can’t do it, but if they fail, that that might mean that they’re not good enough, that they’ll have to do it again. There’s all kinds of psychology around that. But if we start with the priority, if you plug away on your number one priority, even if you don’t get it done and it takes you all day, you’ve still made more progress than someone who’s checked off a thousand things on their trivial to-do list. All the 80% items that just don’t matter. So prioritize your work.
I also find, this is like a little ancillary benefit, when I do my one thing in a given area, I feel a great relief. I feel a great sense of freedom knowing that the thing I know I should do has been done. And that often makes me feel better about “taking the day off.” If I did the thing that was absolutely most important for my health, for my marriage, for my work, for you fill in the blank. Well, heck yeah, you’ve earned a little time off. Go for a walk with the dog. Go take a minute and just kind of be chill. But now, we don’t have to feel guilty for it because we actually did the stuff that mattered first. And now we’ve earned some of that downtime. So, by working in our priorities, we can at least put that mantle of earning that idle time, our downtime, and not just being, “lazy. “
All right. Two, schedule your downtime. And Laura, when she wrote about this, she said, you have to normalize idleness. Like, can you start to acclimate yourself to being still? Which is a very big idea. And I love that. And Laura went down that path. I’m going slightly different. Schedule your downtime. The very first thing we teach people, I mentioned this earlier, to time block is your time off. If you’re going to do extraordinary things, you’re going to need to rest and recuperate. You’re going to need your energy.
That means you have to go to bed at night and actually get some sleep. That means periodically, you need to step away from work and do other things. You need to address your personal life, your hobbies, go on a vacation. I know so many entrepreneurs that arrive at our business store, and they will say that they haven’t taken a vacation in X number of years, not months, years, because they’ve been so dedicated to the doing associated with their business. And I can’t tell you definitively if it was all busyness and not productivity, but I do know that they have not prioritized downtime. And that comes at a cost.
Eventually, you draw down all of your emotional and energy equity, and you go into default. And that’s where that breakdown or burnout can happen. Schedule rest, schedule R&R. I recently had one of my therapists and my coach kind of talk to me about this and said, “Can you prioritize more activities that fill you up?” What are the things that when you do them, even if they’re challenging, you kind of leave them with more energy, which makes you have more energy available for the other stuff.
So, prioritize those things that fill you up. Maybe it’s going out and playing pickleball with your friends. Maybe it’s hanging out with your spouse. Maybe it’s going to the movies by yourself, reading a book on the porch. I don’t know what that is for you, but I kind of know what they are for me. A lot of mine involved quiet time, downtime, where I allow myself to be fully present. I love being outdoors. Like there are things that I can do if I prioritize them that fill me up, and they are a kind of rest for me.
And then, finally, I’ll go back to Keith Cunningham, his great book, The Road Less Stupid, the number one takeaway, the whole book is around it, is that if you want to do less stupid stuff, you need more thinking time. And most entrepreneurs, if you look at their schedules, their leaders, entrepreneurs, there’s just no thinking time on it, they’re doing all the time. And he prescribed starting with just like an hour a week, an hour a week to step out of your business and work on your business, to go all the way back to the e-myth, right? That idea, if you’re always working in your business, when do you ever get to work on it? You have no perspective. Step out of the task, step out of the day-to-day, and have a little thinking time.
And that goes back to that Shane Parrish quote. If you have a little thinking time to prioritize your work, to plan your work, to think about how best to execute on your work, you’ll have fewer do-overs and re-dos, you’ll make fewer mistakes, and there is a kind of positive snowball that comes into play, because you’re making better decisions, because you’ve taken time to make them, which frees up more of your time in the future, which allows you to make better decisions and do better things. Boom, positive snowball.
So recap. Prioritize your work. Know what your number one priorities are and focus on them first. And two, schedule your downtime in all its many forms. It’s a lot to digest. This is a big one, and I’m probably going to force myself to listen to it again and again, because like I told you at the very beginning, this podcast is as much for me as it is for you. I’m a bit of an inveterate, unrepentant tasker. I like to be busy. It’s a part of my identity. I like to get things done, right? I want to show up. I want to do the work. And then, I will allow myself to relax. And it’s very subjective when I hit that measure. So, this is as much for me as it is for you. Hopefully you’ve got some great nuggets.
So, let’s talk a little bit about the challenge for the week. How do we wrap this up into something small enough, a first domino size package that you could maybe start implementing some of this every single day between now and the next podcast. My challenge to you for the week is to do a little bit of that thinking time. And I alluded to this earlier. I believe it was in my January 6th episode. That would be episode 486 about the most powerful habit we’ve ever done. If you could just take two minutes, maybe three minutes every morning before you do anything else and ask the question, what’s my one thing for today?
So just start your day before you do anything else by asking the question, what is my one thing today? When we remind ourselves of what’s important, we tend to stick to our priorities, we tend to ignore distractions, and that in itself creates kind of a positive exponential rotation in your life that you’ll start your days with more clarity around what is important, which will allow you to say no to the stuff that’s not, which hopefully will reduce your overall levels of busyness.
Well, there you have it. Hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. Be sure to check in next week. I’m going to be joined in the studio by my good friend, Dorie Clark. She’s the author of multiple books. She’s a scholar. She’s a teacher. She’s a speaker. She is a coach. And she’s also very wise on this idea of playing the long game. And that’s her book, The Long Game, that we’ll be talking about. And she talks about her journey to identifying her one thing and giving us some real practical advice for how to stay focused on the prize over a longer period of time.
And I’ll mention this again and again, because I know it’s something that stood out. She talks about this idea of looking for the raindrops, this idea of sensing the progress, the change that’s happening in the world around you, so that you feel like you’re actually making progress. So, anyway, there’s lots of gems. Tune in next week. In the meantime, your challenge for the week, a tiny, tiny bit of thinking time. Identify your one thing each day. We’ll see you next week. Bye.
