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Are you feeling a little guilty about reading this article? Not because of the content, of course—nothing scandalous here!—but rather because of the time it takes away from something else you feel you should be doing. Perhaps you are taking a break from work but feel that you shouldn’t because deadlines and obligations are nipping at your ankles this very minute.
If so, that’s because you’re probably too busy. Not that this is some amazing diagnosis: Most people are too busy. According to surveys conducted in recent years by the Pew Research Center, 52 percent of Americans are usually trying to do more than one thing at a time, and 60 percent sometimes feel too busy to enjoy life. When it comes to parents with children under the age of 18, a full 74 percent said that they sometimes feel too busy to enjoy life.
The solution to excessive busyness might seem simple: do less. But that is easier said than done, isn’t it? After all, the overstuffed schedule we have today was built on trying to meet the expectations of others. But we do have research on busyness, which indicates that the real reasons you’re so overbooked might be much more complicated than this. So if you can understand why you end up with too little time and too much to do, that can point you toward strategies for tackling the problem, lowering your stress, and getting happier.
[Read: One reason hybrid work makes employees miserable]
Researchers have learned that well-being involves a “sweet spot” of busyness. As you surely know from experience, having too little discretionary time lowers happiness. But you can also have too much free time, which reduces life satisfaction due to idleness.
Think of a time when a class was way too easy, or when a job left you with too little to do. Being able to goof off might have been fun for a while, but before long, you probably started to lose your mind. In 2021, scholars at the University of Pennsylvania and UCLA calculated the well-being levels of people with different amounts of time to use at their own discretion; the researchers found that the optimal number of free-time hours in a working day was 9.5—more than half of people’s time awake.
Nine and a half hours is probably a lot more than you usually get or ever could get, between staying employed and living up to family obligations. In fact, the average number of discretionary hours found in the data is 1.8. But even if 9.5 hours is unrealistic, this huge difference is probably reflected in your stress levels and may have longer-term health consequences. The World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization estimate that worldwide, in 2016, as a result of working at least 55 hours a week, some 398,000 people died of a stroke and a further 347,000 died from heart disease. So even if you never get near 9.5 hours, increasing discretionary time is the right health and well-being strategy for most people—and probably for you too. So why aren’t more Americans demanding better work-life balance?
[Read: ‘Ugh, I’m so busy!’: A status symbol of our time]
One answer is that for most of us, too much discretionary time is scarier than too little, and we overcorrect to avoid it. If we don’t know how to use it, free time can become idleness, which leads to boredom—and humans hate boredom. Typically, when we are under-occupied, a set of brain structures known as the Default Mode Network is activated, with behavioral effects that can be associated with rumination and self-preoccupation.
The pattern of thought when that network is involved can be merely trivial (How did my fingernails get so dirty?) or speculatively terrifying (What could my teenager be up to?). To avoid activating this unproductively ruminative state, we look for ways to force ourselves to be busy, such as scrolling through social media and staying busy with some goal-oriented task. In other words, the crazy calendar that doesn’t even give you time to use the bathroom might be—at least in part—a self-imposed creation, after you said “yes” to too many things as an insurance policy against going into that default mode.
Besides having a dread of anxiously pensive boredom, we respond to two other factors when we make ourselves overly busy. First, in American culture, busyness tends to confer social status. Researchers in 2017 demonstrated this with a series of experiments, such as one in which subjects were asked to rate the status of a person based on their Facebook posts. According to their findings, posts that publicized an overworked lifestyle were rated more highly. Second, work performance and busyness tend to be positively correlated.
Research from 2016 also showed that busier people had faster processing speed, better memory, better reasoning, and more knowledge than less busy people. Noteworthy, though, is that the direction of causation is unclear: High performers at work may simply be people who make themselves busier, and they would be just as effective and able if they thinned out their schedule in an effort to be happier.
[Arthur C. Brooks: Overwhelmed? Just say ‘no.’]
For most people, the trouble with busyness is that they are far below the sweet spot of discretionary time in their average workday. This may be unavoidable in part, and some people have a lot less control than others over their schedule. But as the research suggests, many people seem to be inflicting greater busyness on themselves than is necessary because of a fear of idleness.
The solution starts with knowledge of this tendency and a willingness to confront it. Carefully monitor your work patterns and commitments for a week. If you have a hole in your schedule, do you jam it with a low-priority meeting or tasks you would ordinarily avoid? When you unexpectedly find yourself with a free hour because of a cancellation, do you fill it with make-work such as calls and emails that aren’t immediately necessary? These are telltale signs of idleness aversion.
One remedy is to create a list of discretionary tasks that are creative and attractive to you but do not involve a deadline. For me, this means sketching out book ideas in a notebook I carry around with me. When I have unfilled time, I pull out the notebook and start brainstorming. This inevitably induces a pleasurable “flow state,” which gives me energy and refreshes me—and creates an incentive to block out more discretionary time. At one point in my career, when I was running a large organization, this observation led me to ring-fence two hours a day in the morning, when I know that my brain chemistry is best for idea work.
Beyond being fun, such a practice can be revolutionary for your career. Google reserves 20 percent of engineers’ time for projects of their own choosing—literally whatever they want to work on. This free fifth of their time has generated more than half of the company’s highest-revenue-generating products, including Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Earth. If your employer doesn’t go in for a similar program, see if you can do it for yourself by being very strict about getting your official work done within specific time limits, leaving you time for your creativity and passion.
[Derek Thompson: Why Americans suddenly stopped hanging out]
Perhaps you try to follow this advice and still find yourself hopelessly busy. I have one other technique, which I learned some years ago from an efficiency expert. She told me to make a list of the 20 things I felt I had to get done the next day, in order of priority. Then she instructed me to take the top 10 items and list them according to how much I looked forward to doing each one. Finally, with that order, she told me to take my pencil and cross out the bottom 15 items. The top five would be my actual to-do list.
“What about the others?” I asked, dumbfounded. Her response: “You won’t do them, and no one will really notice or care, because everything else will be so good.” Obviously, there are limits to this strategy: If an emergency appendectomy isn’t in your top five because you’re not looking forward to it, you should definitely still get it done. For the most part, though, she was right—and my life improved as a result.