Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work
Everyone, and everything, needs breathing space. The author realized this when she tried to build a fire during a family vacation. She piled up paper, fire starters, and logs of wood – but no matter how many matches she threw at the fire, it just wouldn’t start properly.
Eventually, it dawned on her. She had packed everything so tightly that oxygen simply couldn’t circulate. In short, the fire had no space to breathe.
Our daily lives are often a lot like the author’s damp squib of a fire. We’re so busy packing our schedules with endless tasks and to-do lists that we can’t fan the flames of our own potential.
The key message here is: We don’t have the space to just think.
Instead of thinking, we’re constantly doing. From the moment our morning alarm wakes us, our day goes by in a blur of commuting, emails, meetings, and, often, family responsibilities. By the time we climb back into bed, exhausted, we wonder Did I really achieve anything today?
If all this sounds familiar, then you’ve hit on an uncomfortable but valuable truth: being busy and being productive are not the same thing. What’s more, being too busy can actually kill your productivity.
Not convinced? Consider Linda, a high-flying sales professional in the healthcare industry. Linda was excited when she got promoted at work, but her promotion came with a crushing workload attached.
To cope with her bursting schedule, she canceled her daily lunch break. Instead, she kept a jar of peanut butter on her desk at all times, so that she could eat while working. There were other sacrifices, too – but even so, she wasn’t making headway.
Her excellent results and attention to detail – things that had gotten her the promotion in the first place – suddenly dropped off. Without that little bit of breathing space she had enjoyed in her previous role, she couldn’t thrive, and her potential was stifled.
When we hear Linda’s story, it’s easy to appreciate that she was simply too busy. But when it comes to our own lives, many of us struggle to identify that we’re doing too much. Instead of seeking out and enjoying some breathing space, we fall into a very modern trap: we begin to feel guilty when we’re not busy.
Economists call this phenomenon performative busyness. We have internalized the mantra that busier is better. Instead, what we need to do is push back against the tyranny of the packed agenda. We’ll see why in the following blinks.
A Minute to Think (2021) explores how busyness is harming our productivity – and why it's so important to take regular pauses. It reveals the mental and economic costs associated with our hectic modern working environments and explains how we can reclaim our time.
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Blink 3 von 12 - Eine kurze Geschichte der Menschheit
von Yuval Noah Harari
