The Three-Word Problem That Can Destroy Your Life





We have a problem—and the odd thing is we not only know about it, we’re celebrating it. Just today, someone boasted to me that she was so busy she’s averaged four hours of sleep a night for the last two weeks. She wasn’t complaining; she was proud of the fact. She is not alone.

Why are typically rational people so irrational in their behavior? The answer, I believe, is that we’re in the midst of a bubble; one so vast that to be alive today in the developed world is to be affected, or infected, by it. It’s the bubble of bubbles: it not only mirrors the previous bubbles (whether of the Tulip, Silicon Valley or Real Estate variety), it undergirds them all.

Here are the three words: “The Busyness Bubble.”

The nature of bubbles is that some asset is absurdly overvalued until — eventually — the bubble bursts, and we’re left scratching our heads wondering why we were so irrationally exuberant in the first place. The asset we’re overvaluing now is the notion of doing it all, having it all, achieving it all; what Jim Collins calls “the undisciplined pursuit of more.”

This bubble is being enabled by an unholy alliance between three powerful trends: smart phones, social media, and extreme consumerism. The result is not just information overload, but opinion overload. We are more aware than at any time in history of what everyone else is doing and, therefore, what we “should” be doing. In the process, we have been sold a bill of goods: that success means being supermen and superwomen who can get it all done. Of course, we back-door-brag about being busy: it’s code for being successful and important.

Not only are we addicted to the drug of busyness, we are pushers too. In the race to get our children into “a good college” we have added absurd amounts of homework, sports, clubs, dance performances and ad infinitum extracurricular activities. And with them, busyness, sleep deprivation and stress.

Across the board, our answer to the problem of more is always more. We need more technology to help us create more technologies. We need to outsource more things to more people to free up own our time to do yet even more.

Luckily, there is an antidote to the undisciplined pursuit of more: the disciplined pursuit of less, but better. A growing number of people are making this shift. I call these people Essentialists.

These people are designing their lives around what is essential and eliminating everything else. These people take walks in the morning to think and ponder, they negotiate to have actual weekends (i.e. during which they are not working), they turn technology off for set periods every night and create technology-free zones in their homes. They trade off time on Facebook and call those few friends who really matter to them. Instead of running to back-to-back in meetings, they put space on their calendars to get important work done.

The groundswell of an Essentialist movement is upon us. Even our companies are competing with one another to get better at this: from sleep pods at Google to meditation rooms at Twitter. At the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos this year, there were — for the first time — dozens of sessions on mindfulness. TIME magazine goes beyond calling this a movement, instead choosing the word “Revolution.”

One reason is because it feels so much better than being a Nonessentialist. You know the feeling you get when you box up the old clothes you don’t wear anymore and give them away? The closet clutter is gone. We feel freer. Wouldn’t it be great to have that sensation writ large in our lives? Wouldn’t it feel liberating and energizing to clean out the closets of our overstuffed lives and give away the nonessential items, so we can focus our attention on the few things that truly matter?

People are beginning to realize that when the "busyness bubble” bursts — and it will — we will be left feeling that our precious time on earth has been wasted doing things that had no value at all. We will wake up to having given up those few things that really matter for the sake of the many trivial things that don’t. We will wake up to the fact that that overstuffed life was as empty as the real estate bubble’s detritus of foreclosed homes.

Here are a few simple steps for becoming more of an Essentialist:

1. Schedule a personal quarterly offsite. Companies invest in quarterly offsite meetings because there is value in rising above day-to-day operations to ask more strategic questions. Similarly, if we want to avoid being tripped up by the trivial, we need to take time once a quarter to think about what is essential and what is nonessential. I have found it helpful to apply the “rule of three”: every three months you take three hours to identify the three things you want to accomplish over the next three months.

2. Rest well to excel. K. Anders Ericsson found in “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance” that a significant difference between good performers and excellent performers was the number of hours they spent practicing. The finding was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell as the “10,000 hour rule.” What few people realize is that the second most highly correlated factor distinguishing the good from the great is how much they sleep. As Ericsson pointed out, top performing violinists slept more than less accomplished violinists: averaging 8.6 hours of sleep every 24 hours.

3. Add expiration dates on new activities. Traditions have an important role in building relationships and memories. However, not every new activity has to become a tradition. The next time you have a successful event, enjoy it, make the memory, and move on.

4. Say no to a good opportunity every week. Just because we are invited to do something isn’t a good enough reason to do it. Feeling empowered by essentialism, one executive turned down the opportunity to serve on a board where she would have been expected to spend 10 hours a week for the next 2-3 years. She said she felt totally liberated when she turned it down. It’s counterintuitive to say no to good opportunities, but if we don’t do it then we won’t have the space to figure out what wereally want to invest our time in.

A hundred years from now, when people look back at this period, they will marvel at the stupidity of it all: the stress, the motion sickness, and the self-neglect we put ourselves through.

So we have two choices. We can be among the last people caught up in the “more bubble” when it bursts, or we can see the madness for what it is and join the growing community of Essentialists and get more of what matters in our one precious life.

Greg McKeown is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.

Attend a FREE webinar with the author on August 28th just send your purchase receipt of the book to ask@gregmckeown.com and we will send you the details.

Originally posted on Harvard Business Review.

Rachel Egan (she/her)

Public sector leader passionate about using lived experience, people power & prevention to create equity in population health, deliver social justice & improve safeguarding.

8y

This article really resonated with me. I recently completed a piece of research on information and technology overload for my masters. Constant multi-tasking, interruptions from social media, email and text alerts, feeling you can't say no, constantly showing busyness to your colleagues equals poor health and low productivity. The more you do it, the less able you are to think clearly before long your a slave to it. If you do nothing else for yourself: switch off your alerts; start your day with completing your own priorities rather than starting on your emails and organise your emails so they file themselves in folders. I'm not on Facebook etc (though clearly I broke and joined LinkedIn) and I'm glad. I have more meaningful relationships because I have to communicate with my friends and family - old school but effective. Dare to have a technology free weekend.......

Nze (QMSI) Kriss Kezie Akabusi (RAPTC) MBE MA OLY

Existenz Philosoph | Professional Speaker | Trusted Confidant. My expertise? Key life Transitions: "Man is a bridge that must be overcome" Nietzsche

9y

Being an essentialist paves the way to smell the roses, and oh how bouquet full they are, how radiant in beauty showing how radiant this world can be xx

Jeremy Marchant

emotional intelligence at work

9y

God preserve us from hyperbole. No, "the busyness bubble" will not "destroy" your life and/or career. It just makes it more effortful. The problem with this article, whixh I confess I have only skipped through, is that it addresses symptoms not the problem. The author proposes some pointless behaviours to alleviate the symptoms which have nothing to do with the problem. I don't think the author has the faintest idea _why_ people do "busyness" - which, of course, _is_ a problem in the workplace. Yet, unless you understand why you have a problem, you have no chance of permanently fixing it. The best you can hope for is endlessly convoluted workarounds; ironic in this case, since the work arounds themselves then constitute busyness. Had the author suggested some remedies for fixing the problem, he and his readers would notice that the symptoms melt away without any attention being specifically given to them.

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We have forgotten to use the word "free will." Living in NYC, many were too busy to do anything. Choices not reality, It is even worse now as articulated by Greg McKeown

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