Morning Thoughts: The Chasm Between Being "Busy" and Being "Productive"

Saturday, June 3rd, 2023

So here we go, another edition of "Morning Thoughts..." in the afternoon. But at least I started this before noon!

The Eternal Cycle of Busy-ness

As I started racing through my normal morning routine, I really was reminded of how there is a huge difference between being busy and actually being productive.

I had "lots of things to do," but were they particularly important or meaningful?

Last night I wrote about the plague of interruptions that seem to have infected modern life, and this is really just an expansion of that same theme.

I was getting ready to start in on a busy day, and realized that I really needed to tidy up my desk in order to hope to get much done. Which, in turn, reminded me of an article I read many years ago about a man whose primary problem with productivity was that he always needed to tidy up his desk so he could get his work done.

Of course, it was a humorous piece but the point was still well taken.

As I looked around — and then got up and walked outside with my phone — I realized how much of our lives themselves are actually set up to keep us busy, or at least to give the appearance that we were busy, while not being particularly well designed to help us be genuinely productive and getting things done.

To wit, I am now sitting outside in my back yard in a chair in the sun working on this blog post on a mobile device, rather than at my desk in front of my computer. My alleged work space.

How nuts is that?

A Man With Focus...

My dad was a good example of getting his work done. The only things ever on his desk were the things he was working on. If he was working on taxes the only thing on his desk would be the documents relating to doing taxes. If he was working on a plan for some new piece of machinery at the factory, the only thing on his desk at that time were the things related to designing that machinery.

Of course, the obvious observation in all this was that whenever he was finished with his work for the day he tidied it up and put everything away so that his desk was clean and fresh for the following day. Maybe we don't all work on a desk, but let's just substitute in the word "workspace."

It would be easy to come up with a million reasons and rationalizations for why that doesn't work in our world of 2023.

Maybe we're working on projects that go more than one day long, and it would be counterproductive to put everything away, just to bring it back out in the morning. That one seems perfectly reasonable.

Then there's the other one that's perhaps more tempting to use: we just don't have time to tidy up because we have something else we have to do.

But is that really true? Or are we just making excuses?

Life is Different Now

In my own case, I'm often wrestling with the reality that whatever I have going on is not enough.

That is to say, the "single thing" in the middle of my desk has become insufficient as a means to maintain daily life... much the same way as many people end up "working two-and-a-half jobs" to make ends meet. Blogging on Hive may not be a job for me, but it has become our only means to build savings of any kind... because there is nothing left over to save from "work," once the ever-increasing cost of living has been figured into paying bills.

And that was definitely not a situation my dad had to contend with. He lived in a time when going to work five days a week, maybe 7-8 hours a day, provided everything necessary for a family, with some left over to invest for the future.

In the end, this all brings me around in a loop to points I have previously explored on this blog.

The world has changed considerably just in my lifetime. And one of the ways in which it has changed is that we may be able to look around and say that we are "better off" and we have more stuff and more technology and more "time saving devices,", but at the same time we're also having to give up far more of ourselves in order to enjoy that being "better off."

Or, as the case may be, not enjoy that "better off" because we simply don't have time to do so!

And now, I need to get back inside so I can tidy up my desk and do my work!

Thanks for reading and have a great remainder of your weekend!

Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!

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Created at 2023-06-3 14:07 PST
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