Quotes About Busyness

But life was too full for me to dwell on anything for very long. When I was seven I became self-conscious of the fact that I was a "very busy person." I always had somewhere to go, something to do, someone to see.

Morrie might have died without ever seeing me again. I had no good excuse for this, except the one that everyone these days seems to have. I had become too wrapped up in the siren song of my own life. I was busy.

They fill every waking minute with action, but they are empty.

I realized that I travel too much on the day I began tidying an airport as if it were my bedroom.

They are all very busy people. In fact they are so busy that it will be hard for you to picture them. I do not mean that they work at their jobs all day and night but that they have much business in their minds always that does not let them rest

keeping as idly busy as possible on apps and websites, which may be the best inventions for not mourning when you're mourning.

My life is scheduled to the minute. I used to be notoriously hard to get a hold of. But now, it would be irresponsible for me to say, 'I'm not checking my phone.'

Sleeping, while I am sleeping, if I can sleep, helps as an escape. Tasks, busyness, gardening, tidying up: distractions. Mustn't think, mustn't be conscious, mustn't reflect. This escape from consciousness is at the heart of suicidal energy. It is not wanting to hurt the self. It is simply wanting not to hurt. When I am depressed, it seems that the only way not to hurt is to cease being a center of consciousness.

But of course when people watch morning television, Terry, it's a very different animal. You know, they're running around, they're getting their kids ready for school, they're probably doing eight million things, they're brushing their teeth.

Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.

Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner. This

Knowledge workers, I'm arguing, are tending toward increasingly visible busyness because they lack a better way to demonstrate their value.

In such a culture, we should not be surprised that deep work struggles to compete against the shiny thrum of tweets, likes, tagged photos, walls, posts, and all the other behaviors that we're now taught are necessary for no other reason than that they exist.

In the middle of a busy workday, or after a particularly trying morning of childcare, it's tempting to crave the release of having nothing to do—whole blocks of time with no schedule, no expectations, and no activity beyond whatever seems to catch your attention in the moment. These decompression sessions have their place, but their rewards are muted, as they tend to devolve toward low-quality activities like mindless phone swiping and half-hearted binge-watching.

Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.

As a 2018 article from the MIT Sloan Management Review explains: "The 'keep everybody busy' theory remains alive and well . . . in knowledge work."39 (The article elaborates that the manufacturing sector, by contrast, figured out in the 1980s that relentless busyness was not an optimal way to run things.)

We could, of course, eliminate this anachronistic commitment to busyness if we could easily demonstrate its negative impact on the bottom line, but the metric black hole enters the scene at this point and prevents such clarity.

Knowledge work is not an assembly line, and extracting value from information is an activity that's often at odds with busyness, not supported by it.

Knowledge workers, I'm arguing, are tending toward increasingly visible busyness because they lack a better way to demonstrate their value. Let's give this tendency a name. Busyness as Proxy for Productivity:

extracting value from information is an activity that's often at odds with busyness, not supported by it.

We will come to know the Lord, to walk with Him, by learning to fellowship with Him in the worst and busiest of days. You and I will find Him in the crush of life, not in sequestration.

Nowher so bisy a man as he ther nas,And yet he semed bisier than he was.

The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure is occupation.

No-wher so bisy a man as he ter nas, And yet he semed bisier that he was.