Better than busy.

“How are you?”

“I’m so busy.”

How often have we offered that question or answer in that exact exchange? Many of us wear busy as a badge of honor. If we don’t have time for things, that means we must be important. If we can’t cram one more thing into our schedule, we must be crushing it. I’m busy, therefore I am.

Laura Vanderkam challenges the idea that we need to fill every second of every day, and instead recommends finding “open space” in our schedule to allow us to think and grow in ways we can't anticipate when setting our schedule for the week.

Laura is the author of several books on time management including “Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done”. Her 2016 TED Talk “How to Gain Control of Your Free Time” has been viewed more than 10 million times -- obviously, her message is resonating -- this is something we all struggle with. I interviewed Laura on my Disrupt Yourself Podcast, where she discussed how we can take on the “busy” mantel in order to make time for things that really matter.

Laura did not set out to become a time management guru. However, having a child while building a journalism career prompted her to examine how people spend their time. Like many new parents who work inside or outside the home, she felt maxed out and became curious about how time management could be done better. “A lot of the literature that's aimed at new parents is very much like, ‘Oh, you'll never have time for anything in your life ever again,’” Laura said. “There are these certain dire warnings about, ‘you'll never sleep, you'll never see your friends.’ Like if you attempt to build your career at the same time as you're raising children you will…be this harried mess…and I kind of wondered, well, was that true?”

Asking this type of question and being curious is part of the S Curve of Learning? Guidepost #7: Be Discovery Driven. When we think we don’t have time to do something it usually reflects a story we have told ourselves. We think it’s true. We relate to it as fact. But when something unexpected happens–a water heater breaking or a basement flooding–we are all able to “magically” create more time in our schedule to handle the emergency while still accomplishing other tasks that were already on our plate.

“Time is elastic…we can't actually make more time, but time seems to stretch to accommodate whatever we need

or want to put into it.”

The main takeaway is that you have more time than you think you do. People invest their time into things that are important to them. There are ways to become less “busy” and more productive if we are open to a new narrative.

One way to be more intentional is to thoughtfully examine requests for your time. When someone asks you to schedule something, before you say yes, ask “Is this meeting really worth my time?” If you are not sure, consider if you would say yes to the meeting if they wanted to meet you tomorrow, “Because tomorrow we have a sense of ‘my time is valuable’ and ‘it’s already full’ with important things,” Laura shared. “If the answer is absolutely not, no way would I ever even attempt to do this tomorrow, then, you know, perhaps that should be your answer for the future as well.”

Another way to free up time is to focus on important tasks when you have the most energy. For most people, their high energy point is the morning.

“From eight to ten you execute on whatever is priority number one for the day,” then start doing things that require less energy, with built in breaks during the day so you don’t get frazzled. “It's not that you're doing anything less. It's that your work is more planned and focused, and you’ve built in breaks…so that the day is intentional and can fit within a certain quantity of time instead of continuing on because you realize it's six o'clock and you haven't gotten to that one thing that you really needed to do.”

Lastly, it’s important to be clear on your goals professionally and personally. Keeping important things first and the “big picture” in mind, helps ensure the important stuff gets done. Break things down into smaller increments and what seems impossible, suddenly becomes possible.

While many like the energy rush of being busy, it’s important for us to practice Guardrail #7: Be Discovery Driven when we are looking at how we spend our time. Doing so can free up valuable time on our calendar -- and help us focus on things that we find most valuable, personally and professionally.

What meetings are you taking now that might be unnecessary? How are you staying present to your priorities when planning your day, week, or month? What’s one area that doesn’t provide much value to you in which you could scale back?

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Whitney Johnson is the founder and CEO of WLJ Advisors, a boutique consultancy that helps leaders and the people they work with become fluent in the language of growth. Whitney is one of the leading management thinkers in the world, according to Thinkers50, the author of the bestselling Build an A Team and critically-acclaimed Disrupt Yourself, both published by Harvard Business Press. She is a world-class keynote speaker, frequent lecturer for Harvard Business School's Corporate Learning and an advisor to CEOs. She is a member of the original cohort of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith's 100 Coaches, and was selected as MG100 / Thinkers50 #1 Coach on Talent. Whitney has 1.8 million followers on LinkedIn, where she was selected as a Top Voice in 2018, and her course on Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship has been viewed more than 1 million times.?