The Perfect Litmus Test for a Person Who is Always Busy
Being busy is addictive. It’s just as addictive as being lazy. However, there is no stigma on busy people. Indeed, popular culture is more likely to celebrate busy people than to shame them as they do lazy people. Nevertheless, being busy can be just as bad as being lazy.
Specifically, being busy is just as bad as being lazy when you are busy working on things that don’t move you further towards something meaningful. As the quintessential physics formula illustrates: Work = Force x Distance.
This formula equates work only to a positive value when effort moves an object in a positive direction. So, no matter how busy you are working on something, if there is no meaningful progress there is no meaningful work. Moreover, when you are busy exhausting yourself as you do no work it’s actually worse than doing nothing, because you’re wasting time and energy.
Therefore, if you consider yourself a person who is always busy, then you must make sure you can pass this simple litmus test.
- Do you have purpose?
- Do you have a process for measuring progress towards that purpose?
- Is your busy time helping you make progress towards that purpose?
If you can’t answer YES to all three of these questions, then being busy is just as bad as being lazy.