The Busy Trap
"How've you been?" "Ahh I've been so busy"
11 thoughts on the busy trap:
1. Behaviour rewarded at school, but punished later in life: Doing the work without asking why.
2. Behaviour punished at school, but rewarded later in life: Asking “Why am I working on this?”
3. The energy razor: If you don’t schedule actions that produce energy, assume they’ll never happen. If you don’t monitor actions that drain energy, assume they’ll keep expanding. All low agency roads lead to entropy.
4. “If you're busy at work, odds are you will eventually be replaced by a robot.” - Nassim Taleb
5. “It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: Busy! So busy. Crazy busy. It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint…. Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet.” - Tim Kreider
6. The busy trap: Being busy today causes you to be busier tomorrow. You never get the time to question, delegate or prioritise your schedule.
7. Sign of being too busy: You don’t know what the most important question to solve is. Hint: If you don’t know what the most important question is... Good news: You’ve just found that question. “What is the most important question I should be thinking about right now?”
8. Bringing a Victorian factory worker mindset to the age of infinite leverage is like bringing boxing gloves and a gumshield to a drone war.
9. “There’s so many people working so hard but achieving so little” - Andy Grove
10. “You waste years by not being able to waste hours” - Amos Tversky
11. The output of clear thinking has never been higher in human history. The output of being busy has never been lower in human history.
I don’t get tattoos. But if I did, I’d get #10
#3 is something I never do. I get these creative urges and I try something. I get frustrated when it gets difficult and retreat to something safer. I spend so much time doing jack shit because I'm overwhelmed by tasks that drain me, and I never take the time to keep those tasks in check. Prime example: I used AI to create a crib sheet for a class I'm teaching. 5 minutes of refinement and the content was perfect. Then I fucked about with the colours and fonts for over an hour in an effort to make it more engaging. Obsessing over the gaps between boxes without ever questioning whether this was worthwhile.