{"id":6182,"date":"2014-12-30T16:27:57","date_gmt":"2014-12-30T21:27:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staging.communify.me\/newvinegrowing\/?p=6182"},"modified":"2019-12-27T15:58:22","modified_gmt":"2019-12-27T20:58:22","slug":"resolve-to-do-less-in-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.communify.me\/newvinegrowing\/resolve-to-do-less-in-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"Resolve to do less. Busy isn’t better."},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Don't<\/a>
Don’t let time make you cuckoo.
Photo by Tatters used under Creative Commons license.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Every year, many of us make the same New Year’s resolutions over and over again — exercise more, eat or drink less and the like.<\/p>\n

There’s nothing wrong with deciding this is the year to quit smoking — there’s a reason those positive promises to ourselves come up so often — but if you haven’t decided what to do in the new year, I have a suggestion.<\/p>\n

Less.
\nDo less.<\/p>\n

This is not a new idea. I blogged back in 2012 about\u00a0author\u00a0Laura Vanderkam’s good suggestions for using our time more wisely, instead of simply trying to do more<\/a>\u00a0and I shared a reblog from Zen Habits earlier this year about treating your calendar as a blank slate and starting over, adding in only the things that still really matter.<\/a><\/p>\n

I get tired of the cultural value placed on busy-ness.<\/p>\n

Ask many people how they’re doing and they simply answer “Busy.” If your days are jam-packed with activities that truly enrich your life, maybe that’s good for you.<\/p>\n

But mostly I hear people sighing about social obligations they’d rather skip or time-wasting meetings or trying and failing to keep up with nonessential emails. It’s not making life better, it’s just keeping us from ever sitting still with our own thoughts.<\/p>\n

Greg McKeown<\/a>\u00a0wrote a different take on being overscheduled\u00a0earlier this year in a Harvard Business Review piece headlined, “Why We Humblebrag About Being Busy.”<\/a> He says we’re in the “more bubble.”<\/p>\n

The nature of bubbles is that some asset is absurdly overvalued until \u2014 eventually \u2014 the bubble bursts, and we\u2019re left scratching our heads wondering why we were so irrationally exuberant in the first place. The asset we\u2019re overvaluing now is the notion of doing it all, having it all, achieving it all; what Jim Collins calls \u201cthe undisciplined pursuit of more<\/a>.\u201d
\nThis bubble is being enabled by an unholy alliance between three powerful trends: smart phones, social media, and extreme consumerism. The result is not just information overload, but opinion overload. We are more aware than at any time in history of what everyone else is doing and, therefore, what we \u201cshould\u201d be doing. In the process, we have been sold a bill of goods: that success means being supermen and superwomen who can get it all done. Of course, we back-door-brag about being busy: it\u2019s code for being successful and important.
\nNot only are we addicted to the drug of more, we are pushers too. In the race to get our children into \u201ca good college\u201d we have added absurd amounts of homework, sports, clubs, dance performances and ad infinitum<\/em> extracurricular activities. And with them, busyness, sleep deprivation and stress.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The alternative he advocates is the lifestyle of the Essentialist. Consciously, purposely, ruthlessly eliminate time demands you don’t value to make room for those that do matter — including having downtime.<\/p>\n

The groundswell of an Essentialist movement is upon us. Even our companies are competing with one another to get better at this: from sleep pods at Google to meditation rooms at Twitter. At the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos this year, there were \u2014 for the first time \u2014 dozens of sessions on mindfulness. TIME magazine goes beyond calling this a movement, instead choosing the word\u201cRevolution.\u201d<\/a>
\n…
\nPeople are beginning to realize that when the \u201cmore bubble\u201d bursts \u2014 and it will \u2014 we will be left feeling that our precious time on earth has been wasted doing things that had no value at all. We will wake up to having given up those few things that really matter for the sake of the many trivial things that don\u2019t. We will wake up to the fact that that overstuffed life was as empty as the real estate bubble\u2019s detritus of foreclosed homes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you’d like some practical tips on how to reorient yourself toward being an Essentialist, cutting out time wasters so you don’t constantly race from place to place and get by on too little sleep, check out McKeown’s full article on HBR.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Other Newvine Growing posts about New Year’s resolutions and life goals:<\/strong><\/p>\n