#busyness #activity #happiness #ActiveLife #work #jobs
We have a love/hate relationship with busyness.
In his article, “Is Life Better When You Are Busy,” Scott H. Young says he’s happiest when he’s “ever –so-slightly too busy.”
Young talks about the scale from boredom to burned out. He says some seem happier when closer to “relaxed,” while others require more activity for happiness. “Different people seem to have dials set differently for the optimal level of stimulation,” the article says.
Busyness can be a convenient excuse for saying no to something or someone. Don’t want to visit your mother-in-law? Say you are too busy. Don’t want to volunteer for a worthy cause? Say you are too busy.
Busyness, in other words, gives your “no” a cover.
If you are indeed busy, are you busy doing the right things? Leadership expert Darren Hardy asked preacher Joel Osteen what the most important part of his service/TV show was. Osteen replied that it was the 20 minutes he took to give his sermon or homily.
Hardy advised him to spend most of his time preparing for those 20 minutes, and delegate other tasks to other people.
Other companies/employers want their workers to concentrate on the most productive – read, money-making for the company – activities.
But, you may know some employees who find other activities to stay busy, so they can avoid the most productive tasks.
So, all this begs the questions: How busy are you? Are you happiest when you are the busiest? Are you so overwhelmed with tasks that you fear a meltdown coming? Are the things that keep you busy worth the effort in the scheme of your life?
Young’s essay offers three ways to make the busyness of your life more fulfilling. First, adjust your expectations. “Expecting too much from yourself (or too little) is a stress,” he writes.
Second, find more satisfying work, friends and hobbies. “If you spend a lot of time doing things that don’t satisfy you … it can feel like you have too little time,” he writes.
Third, create more filters and constraints. “When the flow of upcoming opportunities is a trickle, we feel restless and bored,” he writes. Conversely, when the flow is a waterfall, one can feel overwhelmed, he says.
In short, we are happiest when we do things. Even on vacation, we feel better with more recreation than rest. We love activities that make us happy.
Make your busyness count. Concentrate on activities that produce the life you want. Do things that, even if they seem tedious now, will pay off later. That’s goal-setting.
There are tasks we can’t really avoid, short of paying someone else to do them. Housecleaning may be one of those for you. But try to make a conscious effort to spend the bulk of your time on rewarding tasks, and you are certain to stay happy.
Active might be a better word than busy here. Stay active. Stay happy.
Peter
Tag Archives: Joel Osteen
SIMPLICITY CAN BE DIFFICULT
#simplicity #multitask #organize
We all strive to have simple lives.
Yet, we do more each to complicate our lives than we probably need to.
Sure, your employer wants you to do as many things as possible. Your children make many demands on you. You feel the need to keep as many people in your lives happy as possible.
Joe Calloway discusses how to de-clutter your life in his book, “Keep It Simple: Unclutter Your Mind to Uncomplicate Your Life.”
The main point of the book is that those who focus their lives on what’s most important, spend the most time on the activities that will bring the most success, will have great lives.
We all know this intellectually, but still, we bring in clutter. We seem to find the hard way to do something, or we spend our time doing things we should delegate to others.
Calloway quotes the great folk singer and songwriter Pete Seeger as saying, “Any darn fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple.”
What can you do to simplify your life? First, examine what you spend your time on. Then, determine how important those tasks are. Once you’ve determined the important tasks, figure out ways to make those tasks take less time. Or, figure out that, though those tasks might be important, are YOU the one that needs to do them?
Darren Hardy, entrepreneur and former editor and publisher of Success magazine, once told of a conversation he had with Joel Osteen, the globally recognized minister. Hardy said Osteen figured out that the most important thing he should spend his time on is the 20-minute sermon he will give on Sunday.
Those 20 minutes will determine how successful he is. Therefore, according to Hardy, he spends most of his time on crafting what he is going to say, how he’s going to say it etc., and delegates most everything else to others.
For Osteen, it’s simple. Success is in the sermon.
So, what is success for you? Over the years, we’ve heard stories about how we must multitask. We must juggle many things at once to be successful. Now, we read that most successful people devote the lion’s share of their time to the one or two things that will make them successful.
Rather than organize, prioritize.
If you have activities and tasks that take time and energy away from the one or two activities you need to focus on for success, then eliminate and delegate.
An example might be cooking. We all know that, for most of us, if we want to eat, we must cook, or go broke eating out. Eating is certainly important, but rather than cooking once and eating once, how about cooking once and eating multiple meals over a week. Some meals are even better when the ingredients and flavors have melded for a few days after preparation.
Some of us would love to simplify our lives, but don’t know what we need to do to be successful. There are a number of ways out there to find success that you may not know about or might be afraid to check out. To hear about one of the best, message me. You’ll learn a very simple way to improve your financial life.
But to improve life in general, focus on the few things that are very important to you, i.e. family, faith and future. If your boss gives you many tasks, find ways to do them in minimal amounts of time. Spend some time doing things that will benefit your family, ensure your future and bolster whatever faith you have.
Simplicity may be difficult, but, if you think about it, it’s not complicated.
Peter