Being busy is just another form of laziness!

‘Excuse me? I am running around the entire day putting out fires and getting things done!’ This would have most likely been my response to above statement just two years ago when working more than 12 hours a day and seven days a week. Two years ago I honestly believed that I added value every minute of all those extra hours worked.

As Tim Ferris describes it in The 4-Hour Workweek ‘Being busy is a form of laziness – lazy thinking and indiscriminate action’, and what this means is that being busy is only a sign of not being able to prioritize tasks and being able to focus on the important stuff.

There is a huge difference between being busy and being productive. I can run around all day long being busy with things that don’t really matter and make no difference to process and people improvement for the next day. Making the right decisions that would help improve your business usually does not take as much time and wouldn’t cause you to be busy, but will most likely push you out of your comfort zone. So rather than stepping out of our comfort-zone we continue inventing work for ourselves so that we don’t have to address the real problems. It’s a matter of doing the right things and not doing things the right way and taking care of the big rocks first. Unfortunately too many businesses seems to value employees that manage to be busy all day long and always end up work extra hours over those that are truly being productive and are making the change your business needs to stay competitive.

To be fully productive and come up with the energy that it takes to make the uncomfortable decisions and have the uncomfortable conversations, you’ll need to focus on work-life balance, on taking your two days-off every week to recharge your batteries and be able to switch off completely from time to time.

If you want to get another perspective and see life from a different angle I can strongly recommend you The 4-Hour Workweek and promise that it will challenge your status quo and what you believed to be fundamental to be successful and happy in life.

Question: After reading The 4-Hour Workweek, what are the things you can agree on adding value to your life, and what are things you don’t believe to be useful for you?