Anxiously Awaiting On Everything Eternal…

Canned Response

I've been meeting lots of new people lately and I have noticed something about how I respond to the obligatory "How are you?" question. I almost always abruptly spit out some variation of  the ubiquitous and colloquial "I'm really busy." Am I really that busy? Well, yes. I have more going on right now than I have hours in the day to complete--however, there are a couple of thoughts I have on this so bear with me.

Almost every time I catch myself saying "I'm really busy" it's being used as an excuse for something or another. Maybe it's my goto: response for being late on a project--or maybe it's my reason for not calling a friend back. However I use it I feel like the "I'm really busy" concept has taken over my life--and I've decided to finally stop it.

I have been wrestling with this idea for a couple of months now. It first appeared on my radar when I realized that every time I spoke with my graduate advisor I was talking about how busy I was. It usually was my de facto reason for why I was late developing a particular application feature for my project or if I hadn't spent enough time working on a piece of independent research. Unfortunately despite all my hand-waving and hair pulling I was still late; and I always felt like there's nothing I could do about it. It eventually seeped it's way into every introduction with a new person at work or school, and when catching up with friends many conversations usually steered in that direction; sometimes it was my standard excuse for nearly everything that was  late, wrong, or unsolvable in my life. I'm sure that I didn't impress anyone with my busyness primarily because, and this is the key here, everyone is playing the same game. It's an axiom of this great American dream chasing culture that we live in: everyone's busy. Granted some folks may be busier than others (like the kid who took 18 hours in school when you only took 12), but once that topic becomes the spotlight for a conversation it almost always turns into a contest to determine who is busier. Nothing useful comes out of that except perhaps a sense of conquest to those that derive pleasure from one-upping everyone else.

So how do you fix this? It's definitely something worth thinking about, if for no other reason than avoiding the appearance of arrogance to new people you meet; and honestly I'm kind of sick of hearing myself say it. After thinking this through for a couple of weeks I have come up with a couple of ideas to address this communication problem in my own life. These ideas can be applied to any situation or conversation, and all of them require a key attitude change.

• Resist the urge to talk about how busy you are. Just don't say it. If you must talk about what projects, research, or jobs you are working on then only talk about the facts of what you are doing. Don't ever take the focus of the conversation to how busy you are. If you list off 15 projects you are working on simultaneously then the listener will likely pick up that you have a lot on your plate--but by shifting the focus off yourself and onto what you are doing you avoid looking like an attention-seeker. A byproduct of this is that you will appear more humble to the folks you meet.
• Don't think about how busy you are. If you are dwelling on how busy you are then you are wasting precious time that could be used to actually get something done. The more you dwell on it the more stressed out you are going to get while simultaneously digging yourself a deeper hole. People tend to blame too many problems on stress. Here's a breakthrough concept for you: you are stressed because you allowed yourself to be stressed. When people dish their problems off on the "stress monster" they are projecting a controllable issue onto something else--which makes them feel better because they can claim victimization as a justification for how bad they feel. Unfortunately this doesn't really move towards fixing the problem; it's a senseless infinite loop that simply compounds into a melt down. Resist this, else it will manifest itself as a terrible attitude and tends to turn otherwise hard working folks into complainers. If you find yourself always complaining about your busyness then you should either cut something out or batten down the hatches, come up with a plan, and weather the storm.
• Be humble, be stable. This was the attitude change I was talking about earlier, and it drives rules 1 and 2. Being humble is the opposite of being prideful and it's an extremely hard thing to grasp. The trickiest thing about it is that once you think that you are humble you have invalidated your humbleness and have to start over. So to avoid a long theological or philosophical discussion on the concept of humbleness let's instead distill it into this: resist the urge to victimize, make excuses, complain about, or otherwise blame your situation on how busy you are. People immediately know how busy a prideful person is--it's likely been screamed from the mountaintops--but they shouldn't immediately recognize how busy a humble person is.

So in closing the question that I have been asking myself is this: what defines you? When I coughed up the obligatory "I'm busy" when speaking with people I wasn't doing it to make myself appear grandiose but instead because it was the foremost thing on my mind (a violation of rule 2), and I like to talk about that kind of stuff (I'm auditory and not too shy). A lot of times we like to talk about what is immediately in front of us--humans are silly temporal creatures--and based on that tendency I consider this very sound advice: "Do not be quick with your mouth, do not be hasty in your heart to utter anything before God."