Are you really busy?

Are you really busy?

We all love to be seen as busy. We never have time to attend phone calls nor even the few seconds needed to say hi to your colleague. Your stock answer for everything that is undone is that you have been too busy and have had no time to look into the matter. Your calls get reverts like ”Call You Later” messages. This carries back home, where even the urgent grocery shopping is forgotten and you live off the mercy of delivery boys. You are indeed someone on whom the rest of the world depends on for everything.

Are we really that busy? It would actually serve you better to realize that almost every person you deal with actually knows that your busyness is only about ten percent real. The pretensions you put in front of them is in fact is a true reflection of the same thing they put before you. So, how come it irritates you no end when you try calling them for the urgent matter and get no response, and get “busy” as an excuse, while you have done the same the previous day to him.

This is not to say that nobody is ever engaged in doing something. However being busy should come with plausible answers to the following questions. Questions like “Busy doing what”?  If the answer to that question is a vague one like “Crazy Busy at work” or “Million things to attend to”, the busyness, in all likelihood is a fake. It may also serve well to seek answer to the question, “who did your busyness serve”? If it served neither you nor someone else and you were just busy, then your busyness was a sheer waste of time or a sneak pretence. And if you are busy all the time, it may be time to ask yourself how good you are at what you do, because if you were good at what you do, you would certainly find time to attend to a couple of calls?

It is only prudent to realize that there are more fake busys than real ones. There are a few reasons for the fakes. One is to show others that your time and in reflection, you, are very important or successful. The other one is that, it is a way of showing your superiority above the person who calls. The effect however is quite the contrary. Even an idiot would realise that if you were truly busy, your phone would be busy too and wouldn’t ring idly. Same with when you give the busyness excuse when requested to attend a meeting. Unless you have a scheduled program of importance, you are either pretending importance, scared or know nothing about the topic at hand. In fact you would earn more respect if you actually said you were scared or claim ignorance than by pretending to be busy.

A thing most of us forget when we pretend to be busy is that the big bosses and truly important people have lots of time at hand. They have the luxury of having time to spare for the calls or to attend the meetings because they have the most important commodity of all –time, at their command. So your pretence of being busy actually shows that your time is someone else’s and you have no command over it.

And then there is the political busyness. The nobody politician buzzing from nowhere to nowhere and doing the all-important nothing, heads the list of busy bodies. There is nothing he does and the dairy conveniently tucked under his armpit hold no schedules of importance. It holds only a few telephone numbers and email ids of people who have better things to do than revert to him. Yet the moment you call, be it the dead of the night, you are unlikely to get an answer. The revert, a few days later, will give you a fancy reason for his busyness. The world has begun to realise the hollowness of his busy schedules and in effect the hollowness of the person.

It is understood that you need to do one thing at a time and we all need time to do what is expected of us. However, no one is perpetually busy, not even Heads of States. Let’s not pretend. And if it is a call you choose not to attend, say so rather than pretend busyness.

“ An approachable and available person is whom society looks up to”.