Too Busy for Your Own Good (15 page)

Don't wait for a devastating experience to occur before you start making changes to your lifestyle. Don't let your priorities and balance become so skewed that you return home to an empty house when your mate leaves you or go into cardiac arrest when your poor heart becomes officially overburdened.

S Strategize
. Take some time to plan how you're going to slow down and find some purpose to your busyness. Design your life so it has some open space for giving thanks, doing good, and investing in others. To start, write down how you use every fifteen-minute time block for two weeks. Be sure to be as detailed as possible—traffic jams, daydreaming, online surfing, television—all of it. Don't make any judgments or changes. You just need to log your time. Now, notice how you
really
use your time rather than how you
mean
to use it. In later chapters, you will use this time journal as an aid in learning detailed strategies for rebalancing your life.

You are going to plan out your strategy with happiness as your eventual goal. In their groundbreaking book
How We Chose to Be Happy
, Rick Foster and Greg Hicks call “the intention to be happy . . . the most hidden, yet powerful choice we make” in our adventure of happiness. They go on to explain that our intention is a powerful driving force because it is fully in our control. According to them, our intentions are “internal messages we give ourselves that dictate what we say, how we say it, and how we see things.” Make happiness your intention when you begin to strategize the changes in your life.

A Action!
Get busy, but not necessarily by putting more stuff on your plate. Perhaps it's getting busy
not
doing something or actively working into your schedule some time for
doing nothing
. My Texan friend says, “When you've got to eat a frog, don't look at it too long.” When you are facing as daunting a task as de-busifying your life, don't spend too much time thinking about the enormity or impossibility of it. A plan will only get you so far until you put it into action. So just set your mind to it and get going.

Now that you've declared that the “Island of Too Busy” is not your happy place and you agree to make yourself a priority, let's get started making your life better. You have the power to enlighten your workspace and make yourself less busy at work. You not only have the power, but you're worth it. Since you know what it is you have to do now, the next step is putting it into action and making work
work
for you.

Being busy does not always mean real work. Seeming to do is not doing
.

—Thomas Edison

Did you pick up this book because your job is the source of so much busyness in your life? Here's a blast of cold water in your face: they call it “work” for a reason! The reality is that your work will often suck the life out of you (or it will just plain suck). No matter how much you love your job, sometimes it is going to feel like pure busywork. Even the best, most creative, and most fulfilling jobs will not be fun at times. The secret to making it better is to change or fix the things you can—and deal with the rest—while you're there, so you can make the most out of your life when you are
not
there.

You are working smarter when you make your workspace more efficient and comfortable, streamline your e-mail and voice mail, polish some work habits, and institute a few time-savers. That is what you're going to learn in this chapter. Working smarter automatically decreases your busyness, and when you reduce your busyness, your body will be energized, your attitude lighter, and your outlook brighter. Don't you feel smarter already?

We start here because an efficient and pleasant work environment is really the foundation for the rest of the changes outlined in this chapter. If your physical work life is in disarray, there are very few tips or strategies that will prove very
effective to reduce your busyness. Start the de-busification of your work life fresh, by making sure your workspace is working for you, not against you.

A cluttered workspace is
not
the sign of a creative mind. It's the sign of a stressed-out, overbusy person. Having an organized office with a clear filing system and your work tools handy, right where you look for them, can save
hours
of time. One recent study reported that nurses spent
twice as much time
looking for an object as using it for their patients. It's frightening to think that your nurse spends more time looking for instruments than taking care of you. And if you think that nurses are the only ones looking for their equipment, think again. The time you spend searching around your desk for binder clips or hunting for that important file could be better spent on any number of tasks.

Your first order is to bring simplicity and organization to your workspace. You must be
ruthless
in doing so, but when you have a clean and orderly area to work from, you'll be glad you were. A neat work area will not only save you time looking for things, but it will also quietly inject some serenity into your hectic day. Perhaps surprisingly, you just might find your attitude becoming a reflection of your uncluttered surroundings. These quick tips will get you started:

Make as much open space as you can on your desk surface. Only leave necessary items out and one personal item (photo, bobblehead doll, action figure).

Clean the desktop on your computer, leaving icons for programs used.

Clean your file cabinets—toss or store elsewhere files not used in a year or longer.

Purge your reference books, catalogs, phone books; toss if it's somewhere else (online, conference room, computer).

Get accordion files or hanging folders.

Set up the most efficient filing system for your needs (alphabetized, sorted by geography, etc.).

Touch a piece of paper or file only one time—once it's in your hands, toss or deal with it
now
rather than create another pile of deal-with-later items.

Get in the habit of having (and using) two trash cans; fill one up, put it to the side, and then fill the other.