Too Busy for Your Own Good (4 page)

Total number of statements checked: ______________

1–5 You are busy
and starting to get frustrated, but with some attention to the problem and a little fine-tuning, you can turn it around.

6–10 You are too busy
and starting to show cracks in your physical health, mental well-being, and relationships. Make a commitment to take better care of yourself.

11–15 You are ultra-busy
, exhausted, and facing burnout. Your health is being compromised, and your relationships are in jeopardy. Make a plan and start working it to save your body, mind, and soul.

16–21 You are in the danger zone
: if you don't start making serious changes now, you are surely heading for serious health consequences and relationship breakdowns.

How do you know whether you're ultra-busy? For one thing, you've probably been neglecting one of the key areas in your life. Sometimes it's hard to determine whether we're too busy overall because some areas in life are still running perfectly smoothly. However, when you're firing on all cylinders all the time, something's got to give. I want to give you a very simple and quick method for assessing your current level of satisfaction. You'll see that the way you allocate your busyness may have been sabotaging your satisfaction and quality of life.

Like so many of my coaching clients, one executive began our first session with, “Things are OK at work, my family's good, but I just feel like something's missing.” I
had her do the following exercise, and she quickly identified that the something missing was balance. Our plan for working together became to focus on certain areas of dissatisfaction and distribute her activities accordingly.

Take out a blank piece of paper and draw a large circle on it. Divide it into six equal parts—as if it were a wheel with six spokes or an apple pie sliced into six equal pieces.

Label each piece of the circle with one of the six major areas of your life:

Career
: your job, career opportunities, business involvement

Money
: the state of your finances, budget, insurance, investments

Health
: your physical condition, fitness, well-being, appearance

The six major areas of your life

Spirituality
: your practice of faith, matters of soul, self-development

Relationships
: interactions with your family, friends, coworkers, community

Home
: where you live, the condition and comfort of your environment

On a scale of one to ten (ten being the highest), rate your satisfaction in each of the six areas. With the center of the wheel being “zero” and the outer circle a “ten,” shade in each area (or piece of the pie) with the corresponding number. Draw a line halfway between the center and the border of that pie piece and shade it from center to that line. For example, the illustration shows satisfaction in the money area as a 5. Continue with all six areas.

The wheel of life

Look at your wheel. This is an illustration of how your life is rolling along. If it were an actual wheel, would it roll smoothly with the spokes hitting the ground evenly? Or would it clunk and bump along like a flat tire on your car? When you're balanced, your life rolls along more smoothly, and satisfaction is the result.

If you're like most folks, the areas you rated the highest in satisfaction are the ones that you put the most time and energy into. Because you put the most time and energy into them, you get the most satisfaction or payback. Conversely, you probably avoid putting energy into those areas with which you aren't very satisfied.

If this sounds like a vicious cycle, it is. But the good news is that you can change all that—your busyness, your balance, and your happiness. You might think that you're busy because you have to be, or because you want to be. But why are you
really
busy? This book is aimed at helping you find the answer and giving you the tools to get your busyness in balance so you will have more satisfaction and meaning in your life.

Some of the audience members at my workshops have told me that as long as they're still putting one foot in front of the other, they'll keep powering forward. In a way, this is true—I know how to ignore a twitching eye or back spasm and “carry on.” Right before the personal collapse that landed me in the ER, I was doing call-in radio shows before the sun came up, speaking around the nation several times a month, writing books, and monitoring my grandmother's care in assisted living, all while being a newlywed, daughter, friend, and business owner. It felt normal to me, but my body let me know that it wasn't normal.

You might not be aware of how your own busyness and overstimulation have gotten out of hand. The type of busy that overtakes your life does so incrementally, not all at once. You've probably added tasks, behaviors, and thoughts little by little, so that you were never fully aware that your busyness level was going into the danger zone.

Don't be a casualty; de-busify now! Use the information in this book to de-stress and rebalance your life. Your body, soul, friends, and family will all be grateful that you did. Every great journey begins with one first step. Take a look at some of the reasons you're so busy. After reading the entire book, focus on the areas in which you're feeling the most frustrated, angry, out of control, or hopeless. Find the skills, tips, answers, and suggestions that work for you.

Happy de-busifying!

It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about
?

—Henry David Thoreau

What are the
real
reasons you fill your days and nights with activities until you've run yourself ragged? “Who else is going to do it?” “What choice do I have?” Yes, but why else? Go deeper. You are part of a culture of overachievers who aim to be deliriously happy and wildly successful at the same time rather than merely content and comfortable. But your reasons for being busy go beyond that. Perhaps you're proving your worth to an estranged family or showing the old neighborhood that you've succeeded in spite of your troubled teens. Possibly you just want to fit into a clique that you fought hard to be accepted by or thumb your nose at the bully who claims you'll never amount to anything.