The Real Reason We're All So Busy (and What to Do About It) | Dorie Clark | TEDxBoston

We live in a time-pressed culture. There is never enough time. And we see it, we feel it around us every day. We live in a world that valorizes work, accomplishment, busyness. And there's real upside to that. There's real value. We're pushed, we're driven toward achievement and action and creation. And that's great. But there's also a downside. And that's something that I think is worth talking about. There was a study done a while back by the Management Research Group of 10,000 senior leaders. And they asked them, what is key to your organization's success? And 97% said long-term strategic thinking. I mean, when was the last time that 97% of people agreed on anything? There is near unanimity that being a long-term thinker, having perspective, having the ability to think and ask big questions is essential to our success. And yet, in a separate study, 96% of leaders were surveyed. And they said they don't have time for strategic thinking. What is going on? Why is it, how can it be that 96% of people are not doing the one thing that they say is most critical to their success? Well, I think we know the answer. Or at least we think we do. The average professional attends 62 meetings per month. That sounds pretty outrageous. How could that be? But if you actually break it down, it's not that many. It's two to three meetings per day, which is probably average for many of you. So 62 meetings a month. That does not help, and that is not wrong. It is a contributor. Also, we know, we know what else? Email. A study a while back by McKinsey showed that the average professional spends 28% of their time just responding to email. Of course that drains us. Of course that makes us busy. But the truth is, it's also, I believe, not the full picture. Those are manifestations. Those are problems, legitimately. But there are also some other things going on underneath the surface. Reasons that perhaps we are in some ways working at cross-purposes. Because for so long, almost all of us have said we want desperately to be less busy. And yet we keep making choices that put ourselves in the position where we're just as busy as we've always been. What is going on? Well, some research out of Columbia University sheds a little bit of light on this. Sylvia Baletza and her colleagues have done interesting research into the fact that in some cultures, American culture chief among them, busyness is actually a form of status. When we say, oh, I am so crazy busy, what we're really saying is a societally accepted version of I am so important, I am so popular, I am so in demand. And the truth is, that feeling can be hard to give up, even if we say that we want to. That's not the only reason, of course. It turns out, it is very hard for the human mind to deal with conditions of uncertainty. And in modern life, there's a lot of it. Sometimes we are given tasks or challenges. And the truth is, tactically, we just don't know how to do it, increase sales by 30%. Well, how? There's a lot of ways you could do it, you're not sure how. Sometimes it's easier, frankly, to just double down and keep doing more of what you're already doing. That might not be the best answer, but it's an answer, and it removes uncertainty. The picture gets even worse when we're talking about existential questions, when we're talking about uncomfortable matters that we might not actually really want to deal with. That might be, am I in the right job? It might be, am I in the right career? Those are often questions, truth be told, we might not want the answer to. And so we become busy as a way so that we don't even have to ask the question. Now, there's a third reason, and I'll admit, it's one that I know well, personally, and that is that sometimes we use busyness as a way to numb ourselves out. I've experienced that. This is my boy, Gideon, and he died in 2013. I had had him for 17 years, and he was my best friend. And after he died, I'll be honest, I didn't want to be home because I knew that he wouldn't be there. And so for two years, my life basically was an Uber to an airport, to a hotel, and back again, because I just really didn't want to face that. For a lot of us, there are things we sometimes don't want to face. What we're really looking for with work is an anesthetic. And as I like to say, work is better than crack. So if you're choosing, not the worst. But the truth is, it's also not a sustainable solution. For many of us, we get trapped in the pattern of busyness, of overwork. It's hard sometimes even to remember what it was like before. Oftentimes in our mind's eye, when we think of busyness, what we think of is this. What we think of is triumphant success and the world at your fingertips. The truth is, more often, busyness looks like this. It looks like loneliness. It looks like frustration. It looks like having a life that's not really in your full control. So I would like to propose that we make a change. Because if we are ever going to succeed in beating back busyness once and for all, first of all, we have to get real and acknowledge what is actually behind some of the busyness that is filling our days. We have to really get honest about what it is that's motivating us so that we can make a different choice. Because it is about our choice. We need to recognize that real freedom is about creating the space so that we can breathe, the space so that we can think. Ultimately, real freedom is about choosing how and with whom we want to be spending our time. Thank you.