Do You Have Busy Disease?

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week’s episode of the Dr. Sam Collins podcast. I hope that you are doing really well on this, well, for me, Monday, whenever you’re listening to this, whether it’s today or it’s a little bit in the future. And I want to talk today about something that I call busy disease. And I’m going to invite you to consider whether you have this dreaded disease. and I’m going to talk about what it is and why it exists and really what you might consider doing about it because busy disease, which is different from being busy, so we’ll talk about that, it really does start to erode your choices and your thinking and your recovery and ultimately your freedom. So I want to invite you to think about this today so that you can have all more of all of those things and So that perhaps you can encourage those around you also to have more of those things as well So if that sounds interesting stay tuned and we’re going to talk today about busy disease and Ordinary busy is okay. It’s can be very positive. So I don’t want you to get mad at me if you like being busy It’s when it stops being enjoyable and it starts to feel perhaps even resentful that you have to really do as much as you have to do, all right? Now, I know we all have busy days and busy weeks and sometimes extraordinarily busy periods of our lives, and actually, I really like… being busy when I’m doing something that I care deeply about. But busy diseases is different, and it’s something that I have noticed for years I’ve been doing this work. And in fact, a lot of people ask me about time management techniques and delegation and how to organize their time and how to organize their diary and their schedule and that kind of thing. And I think that these things are

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There’s so many tools out there that help us to do that and can be incredibly helpful and I use a number of them myself. But how is it that even with all the tools and all the time management techniques and perhaps all the books you’ve read or the courses you’ve been on or the talks that you’ve listened to, you’re still perhaps feeling overwhelmed sometimes or a lot of times with all the things that you have to do because there’s always, isn’t there, like another email? another person talked to, another deadline coming up, someone else that needs something from us, whether that’s at work or at home. And if you run a to-do list, that to-do list can be incredibly long. So I’ve been looking for some time and really thinking about how is it that very capable, intelligent people are still really struggling with being so busy. And I wanted to take a deeper psychological, but also systemic look at busy. And I came up with this phrase called busy, busy. So I thought, let’s, let’s take a look at that today and perhaps give you the option to think about it, take it away. I find as well, we’ll say that this is one of the topics, anything when you start going into time management. work-life balance, you start edging into those areas, I will say, especially for us women, it starts to get a bit prickly and we start, well, I can start doing it, maybe you can start doing it, resisting it with all of the possible, let’s say, very plausible reasons, I might call them plausible excuses, why we can’t claim our time. I’m with you, I know what it’s like, I remember myself having all of this resistance to busy disease and so I don’t want to make busy the villain and I don’t want to make you the villain, alright? So ordinary busy is okay and there’s a lot going on, you’re enjoying it, you’re thriving, all of that. But busy disease says there’s always a lot going on and I no longer know.

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another way to live or another way to do it. So ordinary busy has recovery to it. Ordinary busy still leaves you with a sense of who you are and what you’re about and you’re not exhausted at the end of the everyday. And ordinary busy doesn’t stop you knowing what’s important and what matters. But busy disease is a bit like an operating system. and it starts to become part of our identity. I know sometimes when I’m out and about in the world and I’ll say to someone, how are you? How are you doing? Or I might be in an office somewhere or in a lift going up and elevates are going up or down. And people, not that people always talk to each other in those times, but if they do, they say, oh, how are you? And then the person will say, oh, busy.

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And then the other person will look back at them and say, yeah, me too. And yeah, yeah, they’ll nod in agreement and knowing about just how busy it really is. And there’s a sort of sense that busy equals needed, busy equals I’m in demand, busy equals I’m important, I’m contributing. And busyness has become a socially acceptable identity, hasn’t it? I mean, could you imagine? You meet someone and you’re at work or in the office or whatever, or you run your own business or even in sort of daily life and juggling all the things that we got to do. And you’re taking your kids to school and coming home and doing all the things you got to do. And then someone says to you, oh, how are you doing? You say, oh, I’m not busy. I’m feeling great. And I’ve got lots of time and space to think and do and reflect. They would look at you probably like you’re absolutely mad. And then maybe you have sort of a glint of jealousy in their eye. Like, oh, my God, I wish I could be like that. What is it that she’s doing that means that she’s not busy or does that mean that she’s not committed or she’s not doing anything really of value or something like that? So it’s got so much worse, I think, in the last, well, 10 years, but I would say particularly probably post COVID. And as the tech has increased so much and we’re sort of in so much, the architecture of work has changed around us, hasn’t it?

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I mean, the amount of people that mass remote work is increased dramatically. And look, there’s lots of really great things about that. I do that. I’ve been able to live and work in many different places around the world and do that work with people who are in other parts of the world. And I couldn’t even imagine my mom understanding that at all in the times of when she was working in the fax machine. no mobile phones and let alone any internet. So a lot of it is absolutely brilliant. I don’t want to knock it. It’s brought enormous freedoms. But one of, I think, the unintended consequences is that work has physically entered the home and the home has physically entered our work. So they sort of become, isn’t it? It becomes very boundary-less. I suppose when back in the day, we should say, and yeah, in the early years of my working, you’d get up and you’d get dressed and everything and put your work clothes on, which has almost gone now too, when that’s a good thing. And you left the building. You left the building and you got on a bus or a train or you walked or wherever to get to a place. And there’s a sort of physical signal, wasn’t there? one part of the day has ended and another part of the day is now in process. And then I think the boundaries were a lot easier, of course, than they are now. Now, if you have a laptop or a phone or anything like that, it’s, well, I mean, I’d say it’s kind of like within 10 feet, but for most of us, it’s like surgically attached. So. Team, Zoom, emails, smartphones, all of the rest of it. You don’t need me to tell you that it’s created an infinite work day. You like that phrase? Infinite work day. Doesn’t that sound absolutely exhausting? An infinite work day. And a lot of people, they work in, I mean, maybe you do, work in a company or in a business that has… offices, or you have to work with people who are in different, even different parts of the world. And so somebody wakes up in one country, just as someone else is finishing in another country, and someone comes online, in the morning, and someone’s about to have their dinner. And so someone somewhere is always working. Isn’t it? They’re always working. And so I really want to say that a busy disease isn’t

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Oh, you can just manage your time better. I think that’s one of the biggest insults that we can have. And that’s one of the reasons I kind of hate a lot of these time management techniques and books and stuff that I’ve read, because it’s like, just no, that’s just no, just no. That’s completely not practical. How on earth are you going to do that when I’ve got this, this, and this, and this reason and just forget about it? And so I think there is one other thing to think about here, and that is fear. And I think that’s one of the most powerful aspects of busy disease because so many people right now feel worried about their job and feel uncertain that they might be going to be made redundant or they won’t be able to make enough money or how would they possibly be able to pay the bills and the rest of it and so telling someone who’s in that situation which is so many of you right now you will be spectacularly tone deaf to me telling you set better boundaries with a be the biggest load of crap that you’ve heard all day all right so we do feel and there’s lots of evidence to back us up isn’t there that if we don’t respond really quickly we’re not going to look committed if everyone else is on at the online meeting or they’re going to the evening event, but you’d much rather stay at home. You sort of feel like, oh, I better go because if I don’t go, I’m going to be perceived like I don’t care or I’m not into it. I’m not promotional material or the rest of it. So you’ve got all these people doing things like going to meetings or going to that evening dinner or doing things to show up at the parents meeting or the school gate or the

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whatever it is, we’re doing it not because we really want to do it, not because it feels like optimistic and energetic, busy, but because we feel like we should. And when we feel like we should, it starts to build up a bit of resentment, doesn’t it? And you start to feel like, why, why, why am I here? What am I doing here? And then you sort of have to fake it and like say the right things, do the right things. And I think that is absolutely exhausted. So I do wonder a lot how much time and energy, so it’s not just time, because you could have, let me explain that, I think it’s really important, you could have an hour doing something that you really love, or 18 hours of doing something really you love, but it goes by in such a flash that it doesn’t feel like that amount of time, but you could have 30 minutes where you’re doing something that you absolutely don’t want to be doing, and you just feel like you should, and it feels like 17 hours, do you know what I mean? So, I think that… This kind of visibility, you need to be there and be present idea, is something that is very, very exhausting for people. And you sort of see in a lot of larger corporations, I’ve seen it where there’s a meeting and people sort of being dragged in and what, you know what I mean? Like you, you must be there kind of thing in person and they’re coming in in person. And then there’s the solo brave person that is online. So it’s like the hybrid situation where you’ve got people online who are completely ignored, hardly say a word, are there probably just because they feel like they should when they’re not getting that kind of visibility. So visibility is very connected to busy disease and visibility starts masquerading as value. And I think that these are some of the things I think that some of you are going to be like, yes, we have to deal with that. So, yes, some busy disease is personal. We’ve got our own personal worries and fears. And some of us are just not very good at managing our time. And yeah, we can take some time management courses and get better and all the rest of it. But so much of it is actually cultural.

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All right, so when you’ve perhaps tried to manage your time and you have a to-do list but it still keeps getting longer and longer and longer and you’re starting to feel perhaps like your confidence or your sense of self-esteem or even your identity is eroding a bit because you’re just sort of like in this busy sort of hamster wheel of doing stuff over and over again and it’s never ending and it feels exhausting. and it maybe even is starting to feel resentful and you’re really tired, then that’s busy disease. And busy disease, like any disease, it’s not your fault that you caught it. All right, you don’t, if you got a cold or you got the flu, you’re not like, oh, what did I do? You’re like, okay, the flu’s going round, a cold’s going round, I caught a cold. Why did you catch a cold? Because it’s cold flu season and it’s something outside of you. It’s not your fault that you caught a cold, I would say. So I think once we understand that, like, oh, okay, right. This isn’t my fault. This is a much larger sort of systemic cultural expectation of what I should and shouldn’t be doing. And I bought into it. Of course I do because the expectation from my families, I should be doing this and I should be doing that. And the expectation from my managers should be doing this, should be doing that. And the expectation from myself. So I really do want you to understand that it’s bigger than you. All right. It’s bigger than you. But saying that, I should say and, and we… can do something about it, all right? So it’s definitely not a criticism of anyone who’s working really hard because you need to and you should and you’re caring for yourself and you’re caring for others and you’ve got genuine responsibilities. I’m not saying that’s anybody’s fault. I want you to have more of a sense of freedom and expansiveness, enjoying humanity in your life, all right? And so I can’t tell somebody who’s working two jobs and you’re the sole earner in your family to take Fridays off. I mean, that’s just not technically going to work, all right, because there’s structural realities there. But I do want you to start noticing perhaps what you’ve normalised and perhaps you can’t take Whole of Friday off, but perhaps you can have a nice… half an hour on a Friday or an hour on a Friday or do something nice for yourself or it’s just little things I think that even you start to realise okay maybe they’re what can I do so just because I’ve done something doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you but I do want you to walk away from this webinar and go okay all right Sam let me think about what I can do from me so I’m not just saying you should become less busy and walk around floating doing nothing I just want you to be really conscious about your time and your energy and your purpose because I strongly believe that when those are all much more aligned that you do have much more joy and juice and enjoyment in your life. And also you’re going to be at your best, all right? You’re going to be able to perform better in your work and in your life and be healthier and be healthier and have more of a sort of control, a sense of, and I think control is good in this respect, a sense of control over who you are, what you do.

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and where you spend your time, all right? Now, one of the things I wanted to talk about here is that it does really, I think, look different busy disease along different people’s lives and different people’s workloads and how your life is and how your work is. I know some of the people… some of the amazing people, particularly women that I work with who are in sort of senior corporate life, their whole like schedule, and maybe this is you, their whole schedule, like meetings, teams, meetings, whatever, it’s like literally back to back, all day, every day, could you imagine? So they’re coming in and they’re just like slogging like these meetings, like not even like a minute for a week in between to do anything. And so And it’s not even like, you’d think with a senior person that they would be in control of their diary, but they’re often not. Like other people, they might even have like assistants or colleagues, other people, and they have access to their diary and they’re putting meetings in. So if they see even like a little blank spot, oh, okay, they’ll just dive in there and put a meeting in. So protecting that time can be really difficult and it can feel quite culturally risky if, as I said before, visible busyness is treated as commitment. And I even know some women who, they’ll put in, in order to have time for themselves, they will put it in as a meeting. So they’ll sort of have it in and say, okay, this is, sometimes they use their own secret codes. And they’ll put this meeting in and say, OK, this isn’t like some time for me to think or some time for me to for me. But they feel really, really guilty about it. And so that time would often get eroded and they sort of might do it for a little bit, but wouldn’t do it for like a consistent amount of time. So it’s that cultural expectation of doing all of those types of meetings. Now, for a lot of people who don’t have that kind of senior positional power, it’s really difficult to decline a meeting or refuse to do something. And maybe you’ve got people above you who are making urgent requests. And right now everything’s urgent, isn’t it? It’s not like, urgent, like dramatic urgent. It’s like everything is urgent and it has to be done today, now kind of thing. And then other things… have to get dropped and so you’ve got all these competing priorities and it’s not easy to ask your manager what is most important and I think there are just so many people who are just silently trying to do everything and it’s really, really a problem. Even people who, I think there’s a bit of a myth out there and I bought into this myth myself when I first started my

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organization 25 years ago was that if you start your own business or your own entrepreneurial venture or your own charity or whatever it is, then you suddenly have complete freedom over your time. And it’s just not, well, I mean, now I’ve managed it, but it’s just not the case because you’re trying to build a business and you want to have clients and you want to be able to be the very best for people and you sort of find yourself being enslaved now to like not just one manager but 10 because you’ve got all these different clients that you’re trying to satisfy. So self-employment can definitely offer freedom but if you don’t sort of take control of that and do it early on it can also be endless work if no limits exist. So that’s just something to consider. Also I would say I know a lot of people who have moved on into sort of later years of retirement, but they don’t call it retirement. They call it, and I love it, like a reinvention phase or a portfolio career, more like later life. And they’re going into that because they, again, want to have more space, want to have more freedom, be less busy, and they want to have this spacious next chapter. And then this sort of accumulates into this incredibly busy life of family commitments and home projects and volunteering and non-exec director work and boards and mentoring. And I thought I was going to be less busy and I’m even more busy. And so when I look at all these things and so many people right now are what we call so many women. we call the sandwich generation, where looking after children and looking after parents at the same time. And that’s a lot. That’s a lot, lot, lot, lot, lot. Where you’ve got parents that need a lot of extra support and really trying to, and it does take a lot of time and a huge amount of energy to care for elderly parents. And then at the same time, you’re trying to sort your kids out and then where do you come in that equation? Well, very, very, very low. So suggesting to someone who’s in the sandwich generation have better diary management or you throw the diary at me. All right. So it’s very, very complex right now and is very situational depending on who you are, where you work, how you work, what you like, where you live in the world. what kind of work you do, what’s going on at home. So it’s absolutely no blame here. But it really is. Busy disease is best framed, I think, at the intersection of systems, expectations, and your own understandable motivations and aspirations about life. But what I would say is that, understandably, So many of us are in busy disease and we’ve got this and it’s chronic. It’s chronic, it’s something that we live with day in, day out and we don’t really see a way out of it. For chronic physical conditions, you sort of have to manage it, don’t you? You manage it and you take your medication and you do what you need to do to manage. that chronic condition and you just maybe you’re told, well, it’s chronic and it’s never going away. I really do believe, though, that busy disease is something that we can start addressing and there is a cure. Let’s just say that there’s a cure. It’s not an easy cure and it takes some time to sort of transition from disease if you want to use this. medical phrase from disease into something that feels really healthy and really free for you. And of course, there’s going to be tons of people around you who are going to be telling you that it’s just completely impossible. And perhaps you’ll even say that in your own mind. But I do believe when we start looking at it, it starts to really, we start to realize, okay, this isn’t this isn’t worth it and it isn’t working from both a personal perspective, but also for those of you that sort of work in businesses or anywhere, really work anywhere, that the impact on people is not good. And when the impact on people is not good, then businesses lose out. And when businesses lose out, businesses start to lose out. They wake up and they say, oh, okay, well then maybe we need to do something about this.

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I think this whole kind of myth and idea that time equals money. So the more people are working, the more they’re doing things, the more productive they’re going to be, how very Victorian of us. But actually the research now is telling us that this is not true. So here comes some facts for you. So people who are… trapped, trapped. People who are trapped in continuous back-to-back meetings without breaks report more than double the cognitive fatigue of those with built-in buffers. So if you have to have your back-to-back meetings but you’re able to put breaks in between, you’re much better off. But if you don’t, you have 2.5 times higher mental exhaustion. 2.5! Now, how does that impact on your decision-making, on your work performance, on your working with other people, on your communication skills and the rest of it? Did you know that there are – get this – 31 hours lost monthly, so the average corporate professional loses nearly – you lose nearly a full work week every month to meetings that you consider to be… completely unproductive. So there are so many meetings these days, it’s like meeting land, isn’t it, that we’re losing 31 hours a month. That’s absolutely nuts. Imagine how much money that is that’s lost every month by unproductive timing. How many employees that there are cross the globe. I can’t, someone’s got to start, like, make that number up. and not make it up, but figure out what that number is. That could be something you could do. So what happens is that in our brain and our body, cortisol and that stress hormone, it builds up, it builds up. And so we’re doing this continuously every day and it peaks by the fourth consecutive meeting. So by meeting four, your brain’s pretty done. Right? And that’s why there’s so many people that don’t talk in meetings, or don’t feel like they can, or can’t get a word in edgeways, or it’s just all a load of rubbish, or they’re not productive. Because by the fourth meeting, toast, completely toast. Now, here’s something that I found really, really interesting. This meeting culture, and this no breaks culture, and this stress build up, which is all

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symptoms of busies disease, it has a disproportionate impact on women. So viewed through a gender lens, let’s do that for a moment. The mental and professional toll increases dramatically for women. It’s not really interesting. I’m like, why, why, why would this be? Now, this isn’t that we women are bad at meetings or we can’t handle teams or Zoom. Don’t, no, no, no. That’s not what we’re talking about here, right? But A study by Stanford University found that women have higher video conferencing fatigue than men. Why is that? What’s it all about? It’s called the mirror anxiety effect. So Stanford researchers found that a primary driver of this exhaustion is the self-view video display. You know what I’m talking about? When you can see yourself, you’re just looking at yourself all the time. I mean, most of us, we don’t laugh looking at the mirror ourselves all the time. So we’re looking at ourselves for hours and hours and hours. I mean, you could do hide self-view, can’t you, I suppose, but a lot of people don’t. So that anxiety of looking at ourselves or knowing that other people are looking at us for hours and hours and hours, and that significantly higher levels of self-focused attention. I mean, how many times have you gotten a call with someone? Predominantly, I’m going to say another woman and she’s gone, oh, sorry, I don’t look great. Oh, oh, sorry, I’m not feeling, I’m not, not looking great today or somebody should just so hair. I’ve done it too. In fact, one of the things I’ve done this year in my year of freedom, and I didn’t even realize what I was doing until I read the study, is that I have made myself and sometimes it’s not been easy and some of you might laugh at me and I hope you do. Well, you can if you like. All right. But it’s my silly little thing. But I have not been wearing any makeup at all to Zoom and Teams meetings. And because normally what I would do is I put full face on and then I was like, okay, that’s stupid. So then I would just put on like a little bit of because I look so pale or whatever it is. And so I just put in a little bit of foundation and now I’ve gone completely nothing. And you know what? No one said a word. No one cares. notices. If I want to wear makeup, I’ll wear makeup, but I don’t want to feel like I have to wear makeup. And so I was experimenting with that. Little did I know it is this mirror anxiety effect that I was feeling. Also, Stanford found that there is a sense of physical confinement. So when we are, we have these longer meetings and we know you have to kind of especially if you’re on camera. And this is a reason why so many people don’t like to be on camera. And there’s such a pressure to be on camera, isn’t there? Where you sort of have to sit there, don’t you? And you kind of have to look like you’re interested. You’ve got to be attentive and sort of have to keep staying in the same position for hours. And it’s often not comfortable. And then finally, and this is for women as well. And this is an additional part that I’ve found. very, very interesting, is that because women get interrupted more times than men do, and this is a researched fact, it’s called the contribution backlash, that is another reason why women find, we find all these virtual meetings so flipping. Exhausting, okay? Because women are frequently talked over, cut off or sometimes have their ideas repeated by male peers without having that attributed to them. So operating on back-to-back schedules means navigating this exhausting defensive loop for hours on end without having a moment to… emotionally reset. In addition, as well, women with full-time jobs still perform 22 to 40% more unpaid domestic and caregiving labour at home. And so you’ve got all your back-to-back meetings eating up, what, eight, nine, 10 hours a day, and then men are more statistically capable of absorbing overflow hours into the night where women face severe time poverty and accelerated exhaustion trying to balance both. That’s why it’s so fabulous. When you can, if you are in a relationship and you do have children and you can co-parent and you can share this together equally, rather than it with the one being, you need to be on one person more than the other person. Not so easy though, if you’re a single parent, how the hell do you manage that? All right, so you can understand. how this is not that women are inherently worse at handling meetings, not at all. It’s that when you start looking at it, this sort of systemic bias and issues for women even creep into meetings. I’ve never really thought about it in this way. So again, I think awareness is everything. Once you know something, you can’t unknow it. And you’re going to be really looking at this now. And me asking you,

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all right just stop back-to-back meetings it’s not going to work or building breaks in between a lot of people have problems building in breaks because they want to be really efficient so if you’ve got hour-long meetings and you’re building in a 15 minute break you’re going to have less meetings in the day inevitably and people don’t like starting meetings at 1.15 do they they want to start a meeting at one so it’s things that sound quite oh just have a break in between are actually very, very difficult to actually implement. And a lot of people will say to me, a lot of the women that I’ve coached over the years, they’ll say, it’s so simple, why can’t I do it? It should be so easy, but I’m finding this so hard. And I think we have to be really, really gentle with ourselves. And the start really small and start easy and just sort of like going to the gym. Like if you went to the gym and went straight onto doing a massive workout with all the machines and everything for two hours, you probably pull a muscle and never go back again. So, but if you do go to the gym or you do start exercising or something like that, the recommendation starts small, isn’t it? Do a few reps, start a little bit and then increase it a little bit the next day and increase it a little bit the next day. And it’s sort of the same with the busy disease. One of the antidotes for it is to do this because it’s so difficult to stop. it’s so difficult to stop. What are the reasons that it’s so difficult to stop? Number one, guilt. It can feel like it’s selfish. Even if I tell you it’s going to improve your judgement and your decision-making, the rest of it, you’re not used to it. Number two, reputation. You might think or feel that you would be seen as less committed, less ambitious, difficult or… not a team player if you do some of this, all right? And that is understandable. Perhaps, though, you would be even more committed, even more ambitious if you were doing it. And number… the next one is… number three is hierarchy. It’s not easy to do because many people genuinely have less control over their workload and their meeting attendance. If you’re told you need to be there and you need to do this, it’s very difficult to say… Well, no, I’m not going to. The rest of it, I have to do this in another. So for people who are listening who are in positions of power, it’s very important for you to look at this and really ask yourself whether what you’re asking people to do is are you able to tap into the maximum of their energy, not just their time, but their energy, because you would probably have more… retention and motivation and higher performance from someone who gives you five minutes of their very, very concentrated energy, then one hour of their resentment because you’re taking them away from their children, their life or their ability to have some sleep. One of the other last reasons why it’s so difficult to stop really is habit. Habit. Habits are tremendously difficult to break, aren’t they?

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After years of operating a certain way, and of course if everyone around you is operating that same way, it does really take a strong sense of self to do something different. Like you’ve got to feel really motivated to do it. And unfortunately a lot of people will only get that motivation when something really bad happens. So… they might get really sick or someone else gets really sick and it kind of gives them a wake-up call or something happens and they just think, I can’t deal with this anymore. So the motivation is coming from a place of not wanting to be in pain anymore. But why wait for that? Let’s not wait for that moment. Let’s address this now and be proactive and say, all right, I don’t want to wait to… I’m totally miserable or I’m burnt out or whatever. Let’s really address busy disease now and realise that even though there are lots of things going on around you that you own yourself, all right? So this is about your freedom and where do you realistically have some agency to… take it back. All right, so this year has been my year of freedom and I’ve been working on myself, let’s say that, I’ve been working on myself this year and hopefully having an impact by sharing some of the lessons that I’ve learned. But one of the things I have learned is the things that we might say are like the simplest and there’s tons of stuff out there to help us achieve them are some of the hardest things to solve. And so the management of my time, if you want to call it that, the ability to have open time, time where I’m thinking, time where I’m reflecting, time where I’m walking, time where I’m creating, as much as I wanted that quite desperately. It was incredibly difficult to create, and I’ll use that word create. I had to really look at it and create it and look quite hard at the reasons why I found it so hard. And I think that’s what I’ve been trying to do with you on this podcast today is where I realized like, okay, Sam, this isn’t really you so much. It’s like all the things around you that are going on, but it is my…

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perception of them. So I might say, OK, I have to work all these hours because I need to make money for my family. And so that is an entrenched belief that I would have had for a number of years, meaning, yes, I would like to have more free time, but if I have more free time, I’ll make less money. Or if I have free time, I won’t be able to make the difference I want to make. Or it’s just not a lot of it. I was just it’s just not possible. It’s just not possible. And so this year was quite a deep look into that, so I could create more space and really look at what’s the life. So bigger questions here, right? Which is, what’s the life I want to lead? How do I want to feel during the day? My day, perhaps like maybe some of your days, was just washed away. My days were washed away every day with… a sort of tsunami of workload and emails and stuff for the kids and stressful situations with family and bills to pay and news reports to read and whatever else it was. And a lot of things I had loved doing, like this podcast, for example, had sort of slipped off the radar because they weren’t something I considered to be sort of an immediate priority. So I was in a…

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really in a firefighting type phase. And so I want to present to you five possible, let’s say, prescriptions for busy disease. And I invite you to choose only one of them at the end, all right? Don’t need to take them all away and try and do it all and the rest of it for the achievers out there. Just be gentle with yourself. Take one and have yourself at least Think about it, contemplate it, and notice where you have resistance and where the brain comes up with all the reasons why this is not possible. And then maybe just gently say, okay, brain, I get it. You’re trying to protect me here and you’re trying to make sure I don’t do anything silly, but I want to look at this. So you’re ready? Here we go. We’ve got five possible prescriptions. Prescription one, reclaim some ownership.

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So what do I mean by that? So let’s move beyond the sort of generic advice of put gaps in between meetings or something like that, because as I’ve said, that just might, it’s just too difficult. All right. But take a moment and realize that nobody’s going to knock on your door today and say, I’m taking away all of the systemic cultural biases and issues in your organization and culture and team and country and world. Everything’s gone. Now you can just do what you want when you want. Not going to happen. Not today. The only person that can really do that, even if it’s initially in your mind, is yourself. All right. So… just take a sense of self and say, okay, reclaiming some ownership here. I’m going to look at this. I’ve got this disease and it’s not my fault. So let me look at, let me start looking at how I can make some changes and help myself. All right. So that’s just sort of, I would suppose it’s a bit more of a mindset shift, but that is a massive one. So that’s prescription one. Prescription two.

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Question the badge of busy. So really examine the assumptions underneath workload. So maybe if someone says, are you busy? Or how are you, rather than sort of automatically saying, oh, not bad. I’m busy. You could answer differently. I’m being productive right now. Or I’m not busy. I’m… using my time freely or… I don’t know, something… I’ve really come up with something else, but something that’s less such as, oh yeah, yeah, I’m busy, you’re busy, we’re busy. And so you might just be even just noticing where people are using the word. Now, if they’re saying, I’m busy and I love it, that’s different too. I’m busy, you’re busy. All right, so there might be something about the energy of the word, but there’s really question that badge of busy.

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And someone says to you, oh, I’m busy. Oh, what does that mean? And hear what they have to say. Prescription three, stop carrying things silently. I think there is so much that we carry that is part of busy disease where we’ve got all the tasks we’re doing and all the responsibilities that we’ve got and all the priorities that we’ve got and all the, not just the… sort of physical tasks that we’re doing, but all the worries and anxieties that we carry. We worry about ourselves. We worry about our families. We worry about whether this is going to happen and that’s going to happen and what’s going to happen in the future and what happened in the past and all of that that goes around and around your head. I would stop carrying that silently. So what does that mean? Maybe start to write some of it out. journal some of it out just so it gets out your head and out, you know, what is it really good in actually exercise. If you start writing something out or drawing it out or maybe even using, sometimes I use AI to like, okay, here are the different elements and then AI sort of helps you, can help you put it into different categories and stuff. Oh yeah, this, this, this, and this. Maybe for those of you that are very analytical, you can sort of analyze it. in a way where you’re getting it out of your head onto paper or onto screen or whatever it is. And I think that really, really helps because you start realizing, oh, look at that. You might even do sort of some kind of, sometimes I encourage my clients to do a analytical report on their busyness. I mean, don’t share it with anyone, not initially, but I think we have to share it with yourself. Maybe other people could do it too, be like the mass female revolution of how many hours you spend a day in busy disease. So what’s busy disease? You’re not enjoying it. It’s not really for you. You think it’s pointless and unproductive. Maybe it’s more than 31 hours a month. Maybe it’s 31 hours a week. Can’t imagine that. All right. So stop carrying things silently. Start to analyze it a little bit more. Prescription four. For any recovery of any disease, it’s good to not…

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not recover alone, isn’t it? To have that time to convalesce. Maybe that there are others where you move this from a bridge of your own individual freedom to others and systems change. So perhaps there is a friend or a colleague or your partner or a sibling or a fellow entrepreneur that you can support each other, not moan and groan about it to each other, that’s very different, right? But you can support each other and hold each other accountable so that that really does make a difference, I think, when you’re not doing it alone and you’re in it with others. That’s why women’s networks are so great and employee resource groups can be really useful and… and our own communities and networks where you’re around other people who are not saying it’s too difficult. You can’t do it. They’re saying, I want to do this too. How do we do this? How do we support each other? And then prescription five, expect a relapse. All right. Hold the line because, as I said, this does really take some time. So you’ve got to be in it for the long term. I would…

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give you the analogy of if you’re trying to sort of get healthy with your food and exercise, something like that. What’s key, isn’t it, is that consistency. So you do it for a while and then perhaps if there’s some kind of crisis or you travel or there’s a problem or something, you can slip back again. It’s exactly the same with this. And so you might really start to free up your your time and be much busy, disease is starting to become something that’s in the rear view mirror and then it creeps right back again. And when it does, because it probably will, I would say, be really careful with that, hold the line, be like, okay, I remember that this might happen and look at it and get yourself back on track as quickly as you can and be kind to yourself and look, okay, all right, well, that’s really interesting. I can do this. I’m in these situations and I can do this with these people, but I find it really difficult in that situation or when I’m asked by that person. And so that’s something to pay attention to. So whenever you go off track, it really is a good opportunity to look at it analytically and say, OK, this is what I will do differently next time if I’m in that situation. All right. So you’ve got five prescriptions. Reclaim some ownership.

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question the badge of busy, stop carrying things silently, do not recover alone and expect relapse, but learn and get back on track. So if you were to pick one of them, just one, the one that you think could be helpful for you, maybe it’s the one that you thought, hmm, yeah, I can, that seems doable. I can, I can do that one. Or maybe it’s somewhere you got… it’s not which one of those did you get like the most resistance to and you’re like that’s never going to happen and you had your yes but because that might reveal the one that you really really need to work on and then as you work on this as well remember that other people around you will notice and they will see what you’re doing and they you will become a role model for them and you get to perhaps create not only more freedom for yourself, but you make it easier for someone around you to work or live differently too. So yeah, perhaps the cure for busy disease is not learning how to fit more in. Perhaps it’s about learning how to let go of more and to…

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eloquently and respectfully say no to more and to be able to have that true self-respect for yourself and what you are not only capable of, because I know you’re capable of a lot, but at what cost? All right, at what cost? So this is about you having more freedom, more power to be able to… be influential and make the difference that you want to make, whatever age or stage you are in your career and life. Let’s stop treating exhaustion as proof that we’re doing good things because I don’t believe that that’s true anymore. This has really, really, really got to change. So hope, yeah, busy disease and some prescriptions for it. Take this away.

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think about it a little bit, but think about it through the lens of possibility. Think about it through the lens of what you could do. And even if you listen to this thinking, I don’t have a busy disease and how’s this relevant to me, look around you. Look around you at those that you care about, those that you love, those that you work with. I bet you will see a few people who may have the symptoms. So it’s not only always about helping yourself, it’s being in service and contribution to others. And a busy disease can lead to all sorts of other things, burnout and people just feeling so exhausted in a relentless hamster wheel of life. And so to be able to provide some prescriptions for yourself and for others, I think would be a very worthwhile use of your time, don’t you think? Thank you and yeah, I hope you enjoyed it. Have a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant week and I’ll speak to you next week.

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