It’s Sunday afternoon and the pre-workweek overwhelm has started to creep in. 

For the past few weeks, I’ve been bouncing around like a ping pong ball. Meeting. Ping. Other meeting. Pong. Meeting somewhere else. PING! Awkward in-between half an hour at my desk. PONG! The worst part is, I feel like despite the busyness and the overwhelm, I’ve accomplished a whole heck of not much. 

A colleague recently lent me Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek. I’m about 50 pages in and am floored by this book. It’s exactly what I needed.

The passage I just can’t shake has to do with the 80/20 principle – that “80% of results come from 20% of effort and time”.

If that’s true, why are we so busy? Because it seems a task will swell in perceived importance and complexity in relation to the amount of time it’s allotted. With the dinosaur 9-5 workday, we’ve got ourselves a lot of time to fill…

Translation: it’s unnecessary. At least 80% or so is.

“Being busy is a form of laziness – lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. […] It’s easy to get caught in a flood of minutiae, and the key to not feeling rushed is remembering that lack of time is actually lack of priorities.” Sigh. Yup.

All of this busyness has robbed me of my effectiveness, but more importantly, it’s also robbed me of my time to dream. More on that soon.

Happy St. P Day!

mxo