Beware the barrenness of a busy life – Socrates

Friend: Hey, How are you?

Me: Man, I am sooo busy.

Sounds familiar?

Yup, most of us are guilty of this. The question is “how are you?”, not “how busy are you?”. But why do we do this? To keep up with the “busy”ness of others? Because people look down upon you if you are not “busy”?

In this age, ‘”Busy” is synonymous to Success. But is it? Are we really that “busy”? Are we really spending insane hours working? Let’s take a look. I took this from a TED talk and broke it down into a bit more detail here.

• Number of hours in a week: 168
• Number of work hours: 50 (Considering that we are really “busy” and work 10 full hours a day. But really, how many of those hours are actual work and not browsing, chatting, coffee?)
• Sleep: 56
• Daily chores: 21 (getting ready, cooking, cleaning etc)
• Commute: 5

Of course these hours vary per person and one can add/remove more hours but you get the gist. That’s a total of 36 hours of free time in a week i.e. 5 hours a day! And I have been generous with my calculations. If you have kids, another 2 hours per day probably goes into taking care of them. That’s still gives us 3 hours of free time in our so called “busy” day.

If we look at it this way, we are not that “busy”, are we? So why don’t we let go of this “busy life” misnomer and actually utilize the free time that we have in our lives! What can we do with those extra hours in our life?

What else?! Watch TV, of course! It’s not a bad thing as long as it is an hour a day, right?! Unless we start that acclaimed TV series that ends with a cliffhanger every freaking episode! 😀

Jokes aside, here are a few other things we can do with our free time:

• Workout: 30min workout or even a walk
• Reading: 30min or an hour
• Listening: Use commute to listen to something. My favorites are podcasts and Audible.
• Family time: Spend more time with family, kids.
• Take up a hobby.

More importantly, prioritize what’s important to you. 

The most revealing part for me from this whole exercise is that we do not spend even 30 minutes (in 24 hours!!) for workout or just a brisk walk to take care of our body and our health. Heck, we don’t even spend 10 minutes for meditation.

So why don’t we stop thinking we are super “busy” all the time and utilize the hours in our life to make ourselves better physically, mentally or emotionally.

Now get on with your daily workout, as will I! Cheers!

The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities. – Stephen Covey

P.S. This is not a rant or preaching but my own casual observation and summary of several articles I’ve come across.