The Shallow Pride Of Being Overwhelmed

I had a thought. Yeah, it happens every now and then. 😉

See, the other day I was talking to somebody. This person was in the advertising business. This means she saw a lot of clients and was busy. VERY busy. We’re talking 15+ hour days. Sitting in the office until 2AM. Sometimes up and at it by 4AM.

Overwhelm. No time. Busy.

These days, people seem to wear the “overwhelm” badge with pride and I don’t know why. They brag about how busy they are.

We want to look really busy. Tell people we’re busy. Talk with pride about our long work hours and how we burned the midnight oil to get something done. We talk on our cell phones during the day in order to look important. Or worse, we wear the Bluetooth headset in our ears all day. The message we tell others? “I’m busy. I’m important. I don’t have time for you.” When somebody asks how we’re doing, we say “Busy!” without even thinking. It is a habit.

When did this become a badge of honor? Are we supposed to honor your sacrifice?

Let’s call a spade a spade, shall we?

If what I just said describes you, then you’ve got a problem. It means you’re grossly disorganized. It means you don’t have any systems set up to deal with inflow and outflow. It means you’ve mistaken rapid movement with accomplishing something. It means your life isn’t your’s anymore.

It means you have to stop working on stuff and instead work on yourself. It means you better get organized.

It goes for everybody, really. One of the most common frustrations I hear from aspiring bloggers is that they don’t have time to blog. Regular life gets in the way. There is the J-O-B that takes up most of the day. Then nighttime is usually taken up with life’s logistics. If you carve a little personal time for yourself late at night, you sit down to blog only to get quickly overwhelmed. Hence, you make no forward progress.

Unfortunately, if you run your life in a state of overwhelm, you will unwittingly carry that overwhelm into everything else you do. Because you crave it, whether you’ll admit it or not. We like being busy. The problem is that many have mistaken being busy with getting things done.

The simple truth is that it is all a state of mind. Which fortunately means you can change it all by simply changing your mind.

The first step is to decide that overwhelm isn’t a sign of success, but a symptom of doing it wrong. Like, REALLY DECIDE THAT. I’m not kidding. 🙂

Secondly, start to put in order. If you look at all the things you’re doing, it probably feels like a bunch of randomness going in every direction. The key here is to make it simple again. Simply do one thing at a time. Put order into one thing at a time. Then, it won’t seem like everything is moving at once and you can’t keep up.

For example, perhaps random incoming emails and calls are a huge source of confusion for you and you don’t really like it. Well, put some control in on it. An old friend of mine literally just deleted all his email one day to start over.

Turn off your phone’s ringer and change your voice mail greeting to tell them the two times a day you will check messages. Make people wait if you must! The world will get along just fine. People won’t complain as long as they see results.

Perhaps, if you really look at it, you see that you spend too much time reading other people’s blogs and not enough working on your own. Perhaps you see that every time you read somebody else’s blog, you get distracted and pulled in yet another direction. Perhaps after a week of this mental vibration, you look back and realize you didn’t accomplish anything at all. So, put some discipline in on yourself and limit your reading time.

It really comes down to just taking control again. It starts with changing your mind.

… Because moving really fast isn’t a badge of honor. The rat on the rat wheel does that, too, and we’re not putting him on a pedestal, are we? Last time I checked, that rat is in a cage. Pretty ironic, huh.