The world is busy doesn't mean we're busy as well. This may not sound intuitive as I've made the same mistake in thinking the opposite way before. But later I realized that my feeling of busy or rushing all the time is merely an obscure excuse used by myself.
Imagine breaking an eight-hour workday into two equal parts, namely coding and meeting with four hours for each. Also taking into account our poor perception of time by safely allocating an additional hour for each part to be completed in reality. There're two different ways of spending of our time.
One way we can do is meeting first, coding second. We'll finish the meeting part of the day, owing an hour of debt for the coding part. I'll be really upset in this case. Many reason can account for this, maybe there's a deadline for the coding task, or the meetings make me feel counterproductive, or I solely want to get some real shit done. Whatever the reason is, I'll leave the workday feeling really busy.
The other way is coding first, meeting second. We'll finish the coding part of the day, owing an hour of debt for the meeting part. I won't be upset about it at all. I'll be relaxed for the rest of day and happily discard any meetings if they’re discardable given I’m joining a lot of them solely for presence anyway. Regardless of what, I'll leave the workday without feeling busy.
Obviously, it's only an analogy that oversimplifies what a workday may look like. But the idea can be easily extended to a full day of our life. If we can have truly important things done for the day, would we still feel busy? Or in other words, are we busy because of lack of time or lack of self accountability to set priorities❓
