Busy, Productive & Bored

Whether we’re the president of a country or living on welfare, we all have twenty-four hours in a day.  We all get the same amount of time to work with.  Why then do some people make the excuse, “I don’t have any time?”  Just be sincere and say “I don’t think that’s important enough for me to make the time for.”  It is the use of time that makes one life significantly different from another.

People get busy with all sorts of things.  They get busy watching television.  They get busy taking out the trash.  Or they even get busy organizing their wallet.  Being busy is doing something that takes valuable time, whether it is good, bad, or indifferent.  Being productive is doing something that will help us reach our goals, doing something that must be done, or doing something for the betterment of someone else.

The next time we say to someone, “I’m busy,” let us ask ourselves, “Am I simply busy, or am I being productive?”  If we’re not being productive, maybe we do need to change our activity.  Maybe we’re letting the currents of life direct us instead of deciding where we want our lives to go.  Jim Rohn says, “Don’t mistake movement for achievement.  It’s easy to get faked out by being busy.  The question is: Busy doing what?”

Now, sometimes I fall in the trap of always wanting to be productive.  That’s not right either.  We tend to become a workaholic with that attitude.  There are times when we shouldn’t focus on being productive, being busy is good enough.  For example, if we’re feeling depressed, jumping into being productive might be too much.  We might become more depressed as we feel that nothing we do can ever be productive or worthwhile.  In this situation, let’s simply jump into being busy.  That’s enough to distract our mind long enough to get out of our depression.

Being bored is another example of where it’s important to be aware of the distinction.  People are not bored because they have nothing to do.  There are always tons of things to do.  I used to get bored all the time when I was younger, and my mother would try to tell me all the things I could do.  I didn’t know how to communicate that it isn’t that I can’t think of anything to do, but I just don’t feel like doing anything!  Now I realize that more specifically, I didn’t feel like doing anything because I always wanted everything to have a significant meaning.  I wanted to be productive.

The secret to getting out of boredom is in losing the attachment to being productive.  Let’s just do something to make ourselves busy.  Once we are engaged in an activity, however unproductive, we’ll soon forget that we were even bored.  What’s more is that we may even realize later that we did do something that was productive.  It was just that in the state of being bored, we can never see something as being productive because we are usually feeling jaded.

Our state of mind has a huge effect on what we get out of a particular activity.  Experiment.  I think this book can be read in a state of busyness and a state of productivity.  Reading in each state will give us something different from each chapter.  One variable might be, reading with a state of busyness will allow us to read faster and conjure up more brainstorms of different aspects of our lives.  Reading in a state of productivity will help us put more distinctions into practice and think more clearly.  I’ll let you experiment with more of the subtle nuances.

Let's love the world together...

Love,
Danish Ahmed, blind visionary