How many times have you said, “I just don’t have the time because I’m so busy!”?

But what is busy? It is having a great deal to do. It is keeping occupied.

For the past few years, the more packed my calendar was, the more important I felt. And more valuable. Subconsciously I felt that if I wasn’t busy then I was lazy. After all, we live in the age of hustle and grind as the world encourages us to do more faster and more efficiently.

Year after year, I would try out different apps, planners, pomodoro effects or the newest thing that promised to help me get more done with my time.

I would bark at my parents that I couldn’t “afford” a day off to putz around the lake with them on a Friday. “I had work to do!” didn’t they know. My value was tied to how much I was doing in a day, in a week, and in a month.

And you know what? It was exhausting. It took me four years to realize that hustle and grind were new age terms to sell t-shirts and coffee mugs and that all that believing and striving left me burnt out and grumpy.

Not to mention lost. I didn’t know if I was coming or going, but all I knew was I couldn’t sit still long enough to figure it out because I needed to be busy. When we are lost, we have a tendency to jump from thing to thing, book to book, podcast to podcast. We go shopping for more makeup or a new shampoo or the latest fashion trend, anything to keep us distracted and sidetracked. But at the core of it, we are looking for purpose. We are looking for something to ground us down.

I am often asked by well-meaning friends how my business is going. While I appreciate the inquiry, it is always followed up with another question, “are you busy?” We’ve made busy the altar at which we’ve sacrificed our priorities and ourselves all in the name of getting stuff done.

But busy is a choice. Oh had you told me that years ago, I would have seen red and stormed off about why I had to keep up the pace in order to meet goals, serve clients, pay bills. Yada, yada, yada.

I drank the Kool-aid and it was slowly poisoning me. One of the world’s greatest tricks is getting us to say yes to too many things.

So if busy is making us crazy, unfulfilled, overweight, unhappy, and stressed out, then why can’t we just stop? What, then, is causing all this busy-ness?

People pleasing for one. We don’t want to disappoint anyone, so we say yes. Fear of missing out for another. We don’t want to miss out, or worse, have our kids miss out, so we sign up and say yes. The internet pace of our lives as another. While the internet has helped us tremendously, it has also encouraged us to go faster than ever. Instead of just comparing yourself to Sally at church and Sarah the neighbor and Suzy at work, we now have the privilege to compare ourselves to the whole world. We see Jane hustling right after we took a nap and then beat ourselves up for being so lazy.

The side effect of busy is the commonly felt desire to hurry, and when we hurry, time gets smaller.

We think that better time management must be the answer so we try to plan our way out of our busy-ness. We begin to operate by our tool, the clock and the calendar. But yet instead of friend, our tools become more foe. We end up missing out on the magic that is the present moment, the moment that never ends.

We end up missing out on the point of it all. We rush through life to do more and accomplish more; we throw more fuel on the fire so we can arrive at the finish line and say “look at what all I did/saw/made/accomplished.”

But instead of getting a gold star, we end up getting a big heavy fire. We are burning out because we are living life like we are on fire. The other side effect of busy is that we lose our voice and most importantly, our priorities. We lose the forest for the tress.

But what if we just stopped affirming our busy-ness? The answer is we must pull the emergency brake on our runaway train. When it finally slows, then we must get off at the station and take a look around.

The time has come for us to unplug and slow down.

The time has come for us to unravel from the busy-ness of our modern world.

Carpe Diem - seize the day.

YOUR day.

So today, right now, I am giving you a chance to slow down and take a look at the direction your busy life is taking you. Since our future is based on today, it is time that we create space for a new future by letting go and pruning.

If you are clear that it is time for you to create space for Future You, then click here to apply for The UnHurried Life Course. We will set up a complimentary session to explore next steps.