I feel too busy. So how can we get out of this busyness ____? These days you meet a friend, you ask how she is, and you just know she’s gonna say: ‘Oh, I’m so busy!’ And it’s annoying, ’cos it ____ like what’s been called ‘busy-____’. You know , the way that the certain kind of busyness, not the busyness that comes from having to work two jobs in fast-food restaurants just to make ____ meet, but the busyness of having a ____ job, family, household, the rest of it . It’s become a kind of status ____. Yet the ____ is when I get asked how I’m doing, I ____ want to say: ‘Oh, I’m so busy!’ too, and that’s not because I’m ____ bragging. That’s because I feel too busy. So how can we get ____ of this busyness trap? I think we need to understand how busyness really works in this era of ____ information and constant connectivity. We still have this simplistic ____ that life is a little bit like packing a suitcase for a trip. You’ve got a ____ amount of space and a fixed amount of ____ to try to fit in. And there are the organised people, who fit everything in, and the ____ people, who end up sitting on a suitcase to try to ____ it shut. Maybe that was true when we all worked on farms or ____ ironmogers, you know, when physical resources ____ the limit on what we could do. But now for all of us who work with information and computers there’s no ____ on how much we could theoretically do. And in a ____ economy there’s always a better brand to buy, a lifestyle ____ to make which costs more, which means working more in order to earn more. What happens in this situation is that the old ways of ____ time which were all about becoming more ____, they start to break down. If you get really efficient at answering your e-mail, you wouldn’t be ____ by an easier life – you’ll get more e-mail. While those lazy types who ____ ignore their e-mail so long as they don’t get ____ – they’re the ones who’ll get the easy life because if you don’t ____ to e-mails, often people find someone else to ____ their questions. And I think this generalises to the whole of work – the more efficient you get, ____ more you’re asked to do, the more ____ you attract into your orbit. So, what is the answer? I think part of it is ____ that getting it all done is an illusion. You’ll never get to the ____ of that mountain, because the climb goes on forever. And worse, all that climbing is a ____ way to live, focused entirely on the future. Instead I think we have to learn, if we can, to ____ what’s most important to us, ____ time for that stuff, and then be prepared to let some other things fall by the ____, even if their ____ things. One good ____ comes from a recent book called Overwhelmed. The author there ____ the importance of what she calls ‘compartmentalised time’. That’s the idea of putting ____ around parts of time and trying to do just one thing in ____ period. Because a lot of the stress that we feel doesn’t come from having too much to do, so much as that ____ feeling that everything we have to do is ____ in on every bit of time. There’s also ____ that if you act like you have an ____ of time, by volunteering in a charity or helping your friend move house, you’ll actually end ____ feeling like you have more time. The big takeaway here I think is that ____ the busyness problem for most of us isn’t a ____ of trying to fit everything in. It’s about first seeing that the game is ____ and then realising that we’re not gonna get everything done. Okay, I’ve got to go, I’m ____ really busy.

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