Jay Papasan:
There’s a drug that’s perfectly legal, it’s socially acceptable, people may be, even, favor it at times, but it’s most likely undoing a lot of your long-term success. And that drug is called busyness. And a lot of very successful people that we meet, that we run into in The ONE Thing business are highly addicted to it. They’ve come into a cycle of busyness that they don’t know how to break. So, we’re revisiting busyness today, and we’re gonna do a little bit of an intervention.
And to kick it off, I’m gonna tell you a story, a historical little bit about Albert Einstein. In 1921, he won the Nobel Prize. And he was supposed to go to Stockholm to receive the prize and do the award ceremony, but he had already agreed at that time to do a lecture tour in Japan. And he opted to skip the award ceremony and go to Japan. So, he was staying at the Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel, and a courier arrived to drop off a package, and it’s unclear from the notes of history whether he didn’t have a tip or maybe the courier wouldn’t accept it but Einstein wanted to give him something.
So, he wrote a note, kind of a life truth and aphorism in life in German, and he told the courier, “Hold onto this, it might be valuable someday.” And here’s what the note said, it was his theory of happiness, “A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness.”
Now, here’s the thing. That note did turn out to be very valuable. The courier held onto it. He passed it on in his family. And a few years back, it sold at auction in Jerusalem for $1.56 million. Just as a collectible, his handwritten note on happiness from Albert Einstein, $1.56 million. So, yeah, he was right. It turned out to be very valuable. And that courier and his family, hopefully, did very well. That’s wonderful.
But here’s the thing. The advice itself is infinitely more valuable. And we have to ask our questions like, why can’t we take it? Why can’t we choose success with, also, not going into this constant restlessness? Why do we always kind of lean into the busyness? Our culture, our productivity culture tends to reward it. It can actually be status.
I was reading the other day, a friend was reading to me from a book, I think it’s the Ruthless Elimination of Worry, and they were talking about how leisure used to be a status symbol for the wealthy, and now it’s busyness. Right? So, it’s rewarded by our culture. It says you’re important and successful in a lot of workplaces. It is absolutely the drug of choice. Busyness is the new black.
So, let’s talk about how we figure out if this is something that we really need to work on for ourselves, and then tackle the ways that we can break out of the cycle of busyness.
I’m Jay Papasan and this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.
All right. So, let’s diagnose this. Now, we often talk about a quote, and it showed up a lot in our trainings, and I believe it’s actually by a guy named Ian Simkins who said, “If busyness is your drug, rest will feel like stress.” And when we share that on a stage, there’s usually a collective oomph, right? People feel seen in that moment and not in the best way. We’ve all had that moment. It’s like, “Ah, that’s me. That sounds like me. Now, what do I do about it?”
And when you look at busyness and you read the literature, it’s people who have this psychological pull to constantly be in activity, to be constantly in task completion and motion. And we’ll dive in, in this episode, into a couple of the reasons that we tend to do that because we’re actually all hardwired in certain ways. But here are some symptoms that maybe you have a slight addiction, that you have caught into the cycle of busyness.
Number one is I hear people saying, “I really have a yes problem,” or “I struggle to say no.” So, when new opportunities, new tasks cross their plate, their default answer to everything is yes. That is a big one because if we’re always saying yes to everything, we never break out of the cycle. So, that is part of the intervention. It’s gonna be, how do we figure out how to say no with more frequency, so that we’re taking on less, and that’ll allow us to maybe pursue success in a slightly different way.
When people ask you how you are doing, is your default answer “busy”? Guess what? I became aware of that recently and I started tracking my own answers and I could tell you so often when you say, “How are you doing, Jay?” my default answer is often “Busy.” And I’m trying to change that personally just to let you know. A lot of people wear their hours and their exhaustion as like a badge of honor. They like to brag about how long they work and how hard they work. And they’re buying into this kind of cultural idea that if you’re gonna be a really productive person, you gotta do the hustle thing, right?
That hustle culture, which I personally find a little toxic. There are seasons where we work really, really hard. I get it. Sometimes it can become a cycle that’s hard to get out of. I also get it, but it should never be our default mode. And it’s a lie to tell people that that level of hustle is actually the key to success.
Yeah, putting in a lot of work will get you farther down the journey. How we pursue our work matters as well. Do you feel guilty in downtime? Do you feel restless when you’re supposed to be at rest? Those are symptoms that you’re also caught in this cycle. Can you sometimes mistake action for productivity, right? That you’re wanting to be in motion, demonstrably being productive. We see this in a lot of office cultures where people, especially if you’re new, it’s like, “I don’t have a lot to do. I better go look busy.”
And it’s kind of performative work that we’ve seen a lot as people have come back to the office. If they’re knocking out their work, maybe they don’t want to get the next assignment, but they also don’t want to look like they’re just being idle. Maybe they just need to take a break, but they don’t want to sit there and watch YouTube and unwind, so they get up and they move around. So, this idea that motion equals progress versus actually acting on our priorities, which as The ONE Thing fans, we all know that’s the key.
Now, a lot of times we get to the end of the day, we’re not aware of any of these, that we’re saying yes to everything, that we’re trying to always be in motion, that we’re just tasking ourselves slowly to death, and then our spouse, our partner, our friend will say, “Hey, how was your day? What did you get done today?” maybe your boss asked you, and you really aren’t clear. You did a lot of stuff, but you’re not sure what you actually accomplished. I think all of those added up together are signs that you might be caught in this busyness trap, this cycle of busyness, which can frankly be a little hard to break out of. We cannot be bragging about the number of hours we worked. We should learn and brag about what we put into the hours we choose to work.
So, let’s talk about why we’re addicted to it. And I’m going to mispronounce this guy’s name. So, I’m going to spell it for you in case and we’ll put it in the show notes. But there was a guy named Bluma Zeigarnik, okay? So it’s Z-E-I-G-A-R-N-I-C. And they document this as the Zeigarnik effect. And it’s been around for a long time. He’s a Lithuanian scientist, and he kind of documented that we tend to remember tasks that are incomplete or interrupted higher than anything else.
So, first off, because of the Zeigarnik effect, we tend to remember all the stuff that isn’t yet done, especially if we started it and stopped. Now, you know this from all of our talks about multitasking. When we multitask and we bounce between tasks, we tend to complete a lot fewer of them and it takes us a lot longer to do them. So, the natural work today of a knowledge worker where we’re bouncing between screens, our phone calls are interrupting us, we are leaving lots of tasks undone and there’s this Zeigarnik effect that says, we’re really gonna remember all of that stuff, right?
So slowly and slowly, the undone to-do list begins to haunt us. Okay, now, there are other studies that document that we have a strong bias towards completion, and we actually get a little dose of dopamine when we complete that task. So, we really, really want to complete things. We really remember the things that are incomplete, and our brain rewards us for completing them. That all adds up to a cycle. “Hey, there’s that thing I haven’t finished yet. Oh, let me go finish it.” Dopamine reward. Dopamine rewards is kind of like digging a deeper behavioral groove that says, “Do that again for me, please.” So we look for another task that we can complete quickly and the tasks that can be done the fastest, that feel the most urgent, they’re not always the most important.
We know this, that is just a great truth in work. The things that scream the loudest are often the least important. That’s a hard one to live with, but it’s true. But we have this cycle of seeing everything that still needs to be done. Our brain’s rewarding us for knocking out stuff as fast as we can, which leads us to the shortest, often the least important. That becomes the cycle of busyness in my mind, where we’re caught in this trap, a little dopamine cycle, where we’re rewarding ourselves constantly for doing low-level tasks instead of doing, as we say in The ONE Thing, our most important work.
Now, activity is not the same thing as productivity. You know this. And busyness almost never takes care of actual business. So, we have to find a different way. We have to break the cycle.
So before we go to break and we go into some of the solutions, and I’ve got like a dirty dozen for you of ways that we can combat this, I want to just talk a little bit about the cost. Now, a lot of you listening to this are like, “Oh my gosh, he’s talking to me. Oh my gosh, he’s talking to me.” Let’s break it down in, kind of, three areas.
There is the high value work that we are not doing. Cal Newport, probably, I’m a huge fan, he’s probably written about this more than anyone else. When we lean into all the shallow work, we don’t get the deep work done. Guess what? In business, in the arts, in almost every area, it’s the deep work, the kind that takes a little bit longer to do, that needs to be interrupted. That’s kind of why we talk about, can you block three to four hours a day to do your most important work? You may not start there but we aspire to get there. That deep work is where kind of the magic happens.
So, if we’re caught in a busyness trap, as individuals, we are leaving a lot of value on the table. As a busyness culture in an office, our company, our services, they’re lacking a lot of the value they could have because we’re always doing the little things instead of focusing on the big ones.
The other one, we’ve talked about this a million times, is time. You’ve lost value, you’re also losing time. When we’re constantly jumping between task and task, we’re saying yes to everything, we’re caught in this low-level shallow work, as Cal Newport would describe it, all those switching costs add up over the day. Everything takes longer to do because you’re starting it, you’re interrupting it, you’re starting it again, you’re interrupting it, and you’re going back. So, what would have taken you 20 minutes now takes you an hour if you added it all up, because there’s all the switching cost.
And I would argue as much as I wanna create more value, at the end of my days, I’m gonna value time more than anything else. And that’s the thing I wanna waste the least amount of over the course of my life, which is why a lot of us are listening to this podcast and reading this book. We wanna be more effective. We wanna be more efficient, right? We wanna streamline our success, so that we can do more of the other stuff that fills us up.
The third one is morale. As a busy leader and a busy culture, you’re actually role modeling really poor behavior. And the speed of the leader is the speed of the pack, we’ve all heard it and it shows that to be true. There’s some good research. I read about this in the Harvard Business Review. It was in April of 2023 that the issue Adam Waytz, W-A-Y-T-Z, I believe was the person who published it.
He had studied a large number of organizations, and he said, those that overload their employees and base incentives on time worked rather than output, what actually happens is that productivity and efficiency actually go down. They’re focused on the wrong things. They think that’s making them productive, but their actual measurable productivity and output does go down when they focus on time. We have to be better leaders.
There are lots of people who are looking to you as the leader, and you are setting the speed. You are setting the example. You might say, “Take the weekends off,” but if you’re in their inbox and in their Slack channel all weekend long, what signal are you actually sending? And what signal are you sending to your kids? They are looking to you, right, as a leader in your family, the parent, like what this person does is supposed to be a model for my success. Is that what we want to be modeling for our people and for our kids? No.
So, there’s three huge costs if we get caught in this cycle. We lose a lot of value that we would otherwise create. We lose a lot of time that we could dedicate to other things. And it can cause a real morale problem. And worse, you can actually end up like burnout. People burn out when they get caught in the cycle or you can actually be role modeling the very things that you’re against unintentionally.
Now, next up, we’re gonna talk about breaking this cycle. But before we do, we need to take a quick break. I will see you on the other side.
All right, let’s break the cycle. It all starts with owning it. We’ve got to admit it, until we can see it and identify it as something that we’re doing to ourselves, we can’t own the solution. So, first and foremost, you gotta have to admit that you got a problem. That all this busyness is not leading you to success. All of this busyness is not a good long-term strategy for success. All of this busyness is actually creating a lot of side effects in your health, in your work product, and probably in your relationships as well.
So, it begins with admitting that you do have a challenge, that maybe you need to learn how to time block, protect your time, and start protecting your yeses with more no’s. But it begins with you. If you don’t see it, if you don’t believe it in yourself, I promise you, you won’t feel very inclined to change.
Over and over again, I see them. I do discovery calls for my executive coaching. I’ve had people, I had a gentleman not too long ago who said, when I asked him, he was talking about his yes problem, I said, “How many hours do you work a week?” And he thought about it. And I don’t think he was making this up because he was actually thinking about it. And he goes, “I’m gonna guess between 80 and 85 hours.” Now, do the math. That’s twice the average work week already.
Now, this person was an entrepreneur. I get it. You might have cycles before a big event, launching a big product where you are really, you know, going all the time. And then I asked, “Well, how long has this been going on?” And he had talked about starting his own business a few years before, as I said, it had really been the last couple of years when you’re bootstrapping this thing. And he said, “No, it’s really been the last six.”
And when I hear this and that’s hardly the first time, I have talked to people who as entrepreneurs have literally not taken a vacation in years. They just don’t feel like they can escape this cycle where everything is falling to them because of their constant taking it on, saying yes, refusing to delegate, not building space for other people to learn and fail to do it as good or even better than they do. This cycle, they feel trapped by it, so much so that they get no downtime and no rest.
So, one really good strategy, and this is one that Gary and I employed for many years when we were writing the book, we would look up and we would realize we need to get some stuff out of our head, so that we can go into our focus period. I’d said, “Gary, I’ve got to clear the decks.” That’s the word we use, clear the decks. I’ve got to go check in with my people before I disappear for four hours. I’ve got to make sure that they’re not standing outside of our bunker waiting for an answer; and therefore, not being productive while we’re there.
And so, investing an hour, an hour and a half, hopefully less for you. We were at a place where we were running big worlds, that little bit of extra time, that first hour, clearing our inbox, going out, checking in with our key people and our key reports, making sure they were clear and they had everything they needed to succeed. When we did that, not only did we have less interruptions during our focus time, we also were more focused when we were in it, right? We cleared the decks mentally, we cleared the decks from a team perspective. We could now go into our deep work, as Cal Newport would say, and get a lot of stuff done.
If we had not had that strategy, I guarantee you this book might have been delayed for years. That allowed us to be far more productive in those sprints than we would have been otherwise. So, give yourself permission to clear the decks, whatever that looks like for you, but it has to have a deadline. So, set a short period of time. We had an hour to hour and a half, I believe. I think most normal people could probably set up 30 minutes to an hour to kind of clear the decks before they go into their deep work.
I obviously believe in the power of the focus in question. What’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier and necessary? When you find yourself about to start some new work, use that like a sobriety check, right? Someone just pulled you over and are you on drugs or not? Are you about to jump into this next project out of a busyness cycle or is it really the next most important thing that you can do?
We put that tool on the back of the book instead of having quotes and other accolades for a very clear reason. The number one thing we wanted for you was to start asking it. Is this my one thing? Is this my one thing or not? And when you build that habit, it can help you break the cycle, right? It’s like the record is skipping. You’re humming along in automation mode, and boom, you break the cycle, you get a little moment of clarity, and you can shift your attention.
Another one that we say all the time, goals before phones. First thing every day, can you check in on your intentions? What did I say I was gonna accomplish today? I tend to look at my calendar because it’s already time blocked around my priorities. What is it that’s on my plate today? Am I mentally prepared? Do I need to do extra prep?
And when you look at what you actually said yes to, when all of those things come into your direct messages, your texts, people are giving you new opportunities, they’re bringing new problems, when you know what you’ve already said yes to, it is far easier to say no, or even better, more appropriately in businesses, not now. “Hey, I’m in the middle of something very important. I’m sorry, I can’t do it now. Can you circle back to me later today?” or “I will circle back to you later today,” write it down and move on. Knowing what you’ve committed to helps you say no to everything that you shouldn’t.
Buffer time. We talked about this in our 4×4 workshops. A lot of times, one of the ways that we can build time, there is a speeding meeting setting on Google calendars. If you were not aware of it, you can turn every 60 minute meeting into a 45, every 30 minute into a 25. And those little blocks of time force us to be more efficient in the meeting we were gonna have, but they also create buffers. Instead of going directly from a Zoom to the next Zoom, you have a moment to collect yourself, get yourself a fresh cup of coffee, get yourself a glass of tea, maybe look at your notes and say, “What is the next thing I need to be focused on?” so you don’t get swept up into the current of busyness.
Now, the big skill, and this is probably gonna be segueing into our longterm as well, is if you can learn to break down your big goals and to milestones. Based on what I wanna do this year, what do I have to do this month? Based on what I wanna do this month, what do I have to do this week? Based on what I need to accomplish this week, what do I need to get done in the next two hours? You see how that works, We’re breaking it down.
When you get good at that skill, what you’re doing is you’re building tiny milestones on the journey to something that’s bigger and more important than any single task today. And there is a huge body of research. A woman named Teresa Amabile also published, A-M-A- Amabile. There we go. I hope I got your name right, Teresa. She also published, this is something we also had documented in The ONE Thing years ago, the same thing. People feel the highest satisfaction when they feel like they are making progress towards their big goals.
So, this ability to do that, we have to have milestones, right? If I’m trying to score a touchdown, and I’m starting on the one yard line, every first down becomes a milestone for me. Can you break down your work into appropriate units, right? I need about two hours of progress on this project and believe in your heart that over the course of the year, by doing that regularly, it’s going to add up to so much more, folks. It will just add up to so much more.
So, celebrating it and doing that, my milestones, it actually leads to greater work and life satisfaction. It is a huge skill. I would just admit, unlike some of the other ones, clear the decks, it might take practice to get really good at, but it is well worth investing your time.
Finally, build in some accountability. Do you have a coach? Do you have someone who’s gonna ask you at the end of the week, “Did you address your priorities?” Do you have an accountability partner? Right? Do you have someone, maybe it’s your boss, that you are going to choose to be accountable to your goals to? You’re saying, “This is what I’m going to accomplish in this period of time, I will give you a report at the end of it.” When people tend to do that and know that someone’s going to check in, we all know the stats, we’re going to actually achieve those goals about 70 something, 76% higher than people who don’t. Accountability is huge, it comes in many forms.
Now, I was chatting with someone earlier today, it was someone we were previewing for a podcast. Every single week, they have this little built-in checks and balances. He’s the CEO, he brings in his COO, and every week, they look at their agenda and their goals, and they agree upon, for the entire organization, what is our one thing for the week?
Now, it’s not a single task for a big organization but this week, we’re focused on revenue. This week, we’ve got to debug our program. Like they’ve picked on the number one thing, a proposal with a company. It’s a revenue goal, right? It’s a production goal. It’s a productivity goal. It is like a platform building. Like they have about six buckets. They agree where they’re gonna organizationally focus, and then they work that through the chain.
There’s lots of ways to make this happen, but honestly, when we do it with others, we tend to get a clearer picture. I know that I do a better job of telling people how to follow their priorities than I do telling myself. When I do it with a witness, I have to tell myself, I know that someone else is watching, and I’ll do a much better job of both leading myself and others.
So, there’s a bunch of ideas for you to break the cycle. Let’s turn the page before we wrap up this episode and talk about some bigger long term strategies, kind of like the Goal Setting to the Now where we break down those goals into milestones.
So, among the many long-term strategies to stay focused on our goals, and engaged, and actually kind of avoid the busyness trap, number one is going to be the 411. I talked about this back in February 2025, earlier this year. I went back and talked about taking your goals for a day to each week. The 411, when you do it, every single week, you’re gonna spend about 20 minutes. You’re gonna look at your goals. You’re gonna break them down, like I described earlier in the episode. You’ll have annual goals, personal and professional. Each month, you’ll say, “Based on where I am today, what do I need to accomplish this month to feel like I’m on track to get back on track?”
And then each week, you will sit down and say, “Based on my monthly goals, what do I need to put on my calendar this week around my big rocks? My 20% the things that truly add up to my one thing.” That little 20 minute session where you’re looking at your goals in the 411 and looking at your calendar, that will cure more ills than almost anything else when you’re working alone. It gives you awareness. And most importantly, it allows us to know that we have the time on our calendar to do the things that we need to do.
And when people take that extra step, “I know I need to do it,” and they look out at their calendar and say, “This is when I can do it,” and for how long, we know that they’re about three times more likely to succeed at doing it. And if you think it’ll take an hour, block 90 minutes. There is a lot of research out there that our planning kind of bias is we always think it’s going to take less time than it will. That could apply to everything but, man, that would just bog down your calendar.
Focus on your most important meeting every day. And if you can, make it about 50% larger, right? Turn that 30 minutes into 45, turn that hour into 90 minutes, turn two hours into four. I promise you, you won’t regret it. What we’re trying to avoid is falling back to this trap of having a task that will be incomplete at the end of that time block, that will then harry us for the rest of the week. I believe that morning priority habit of looking at my goals before my phone. I talked about it, it’s a quick fix, but I also think it’s a long-term.
We really encourage people we work with to kind of build that habit into their system. And I can tell you, there are people who have implemented that and had huge breakthroughs just through that one step alone. They’re looking at the smallest unit of, kind of, workable time for them, which is, “This morning as it reflects this day, what do I need to make sure is on my calendar and how do I need to live my day, so I can be effective?”
Now, the bookend to that would be a day and reflection. This goes all the way back to Peter Drucker. I think he’s one of the most brilliant business minds ever. He talked about, if you’re trying to get really good at what you do and learn what your one thing is, he didn’t use that language, at the end of the day, look back. Just take 15 minutes and say, “How did I do today?” This is where we become aware of, “Oh man, I came back from lunch and I got caught up in all this urgent crap. I got caught in the business trap. I did great in the morning. I had a bad day in the afternoon.”
When we reflect a little bit on how we did, what we accomplished, one, we get to celebrate the good stuff. We also get to notice where we have opportunities to improve. But if we’re just marching on to the next thing and never reflecting, we never get a chance to up our game. That awareness over time, you’ll see patterns. That’s what Peter Drucker said way back when, probably in the ’80s when he wrote that book, Managing Oneself, but this idea of checking in at the end of the day and kind of scoring your day. “How did I do?” That awareness over a few weeks, maybe even a month, you keep doing that little habit, you will start just through awareness alone, if you are aware of a problem you have, you tend to even subconsciously start correcting for it.
So, that awareness on a little tiny dose, 10, 15 minutes, “How did I do today?”, look at my calendar, “What did I accomplish?” that becomes a great way for you to make ongoing long-term improvement.
Another thing that’s come up over the years is Keith Cunningham’s idea of thinking time, especially if you’re an entrepreneur or leader. Can you block just one hour a week where your job is actually to do nothing? Your job is to do nothing, but to reflect. Reflect on your week, reflect on your business, look at your P&L and ask, “How am I doing? What can I do better?” This is thinking time, not doing time.
And in the beginning, remember if busyness is your drug, rest will feel like stress, people doing thought work, it feels intensely uncomfortable. Maybe you have to get up and do it on your treadmill. Maybe you need to be in motion in the beginning, so you can feel comfortable doing it. But how can you build in a little bit of thinking time on a weekly basis? Again, people who do that tend to make better overall decisions. They have more clarity about what is important, which allows them to say no to all the other junk.
In our practice, and for gosh, going on a decade, we’ve also promoted two big things, a quarterly review and reflect. Go back through your goals for the last quarter, especially if you work in a company that has a quarterly rhythm, you could even do this as a team. “How did we do? Did we hit our big goals for the quarter? What can we do differently? And where do we need to focus next quarter based on that?”
I just did an episode a few weeks back on an annual mid-year reset, where you get a chance at the middle of the year to step back and say, “How am I doing?” Even if you squandered six months, you still have six months to go. You can refocus, reprioritize, and still hit some of your big goals before the end of the year, you’ve got enough runway. So, quarterly and mid-year reflections and resets are a huge part of the process.
Now, the last thing I’m gonna say, for those of you who truly are caught in this busyness cycle, those folks out there who haven’t taken a vacations in so, so long, you haven’t given yourself permission, or if you’ve gone, you’ve had your laptop the whole time, you’ve been on your phone the whole time. We all see that even when we’re on the beach, that person, yeah, they’re on the beach, but they’re still at work. That’s where their head is. That’s where their stress level is. They just get to do it a pretty scenery, right?
So, can you just give yourself–as my friend, I think Jen Davis said this first–just permission to pause? It doesn’t have to be a full-on four-week European vacation, right? You may not even be able to afford something crazy like that. It doesn’t need to be, “You know what?” I’m going to take a sabbatical.” That’s awesome, but that’s also radical for most of us. Can you start small? Can you maybe one time a month, take a Friday off? Take a half Friday off? Go see a matinee. Go do something for yourself where you allow yourself to start practicing being at rest instead of always in motion. It can start small. And over time, you might look up and go, “Great, this year we’re going to book two vacations, and I’m going to manage myself, so I’m not working the entire time.”
But if you can’t go there yet, start with just taking a Friday off. “You know what? I’m gonna take one Friday off every month going forward. That’ll be a little bit of my thinking time. It’s also a time for me to rest and reflect.” And if you have to protect it by getting out of a… like go for a hike in the woods where you can’t connect with your cell phone. What do you need to do to actually live that time block? Give yourself permission to pause.
Okay, let’s wrap this up. Hopefully, you got some value. I know that we have lots and lots of folks that listen to this podcast, that attend our trainings, that are in our coaching, that suffer a lot of the symptoms of busyness, right? They’re addicted to it, it’s a cycle in their life and we wanna break out. So, this is actually one of the bigger challenges that I’ve offered. I’m gonna ask you to do kind of a 48-hour detox, kind of like a busyness fast. What you’re gonna do for two days, two consecutive work days, is you’re just gonna focus on awareness, right?
So, we talked about the end-of-day reflection. Put a little diary on your desk, open up a note on your phone, open up a note on your desktop, something that you have to kind of see every time you’re interacting with your world, and a few times a day, just check in and say, “How am I doing? Have I been falling into the busyness trap?” and document it for just two straight days.
Here’s the trick, I’ve talked about this earlier, when you build awareness around your challenges, we tend to be better at actually tackling those challenges. For two days, we’re gonna do a 48-hour busyness fast. You’re gonna try your best to avoid it, but you’re not gonna judge yourself if you fall into it, you’re just gonna document it. It’s the awareness for just two days, see if that tiny little step over two days doesn’t help you begin to make a tiny bit of progress that you can build on and build momentum.
Next week, we’re gonna come back, and I believe we’re gonna be tackling a little bit more of this theme. We’re gonna bring in my friend. He’s been one of my masterminds. He is an author. He is a coach and consultant. His name is Chris Ducker. His latest work is called The Long Haul Leader. And it’s about, as a leader of a company, as a founder of a company, as a leader in an organization, how can you design your long-term success for sustainability. How do we avoid burnout for ourselves and our people? It’s called the Long-Haul Leader. I can’t wait to share it with you next week.
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