Suffering from Busyness? Create More Yutori In Your Work

Eight ways to reduce the disease of busyness and add more poetry to your days.

Our lives are so full. Meet up with any friends, ask them how they’re doing and you are more than likely to get a response that implies how busy they are. Busy. Sadly, this is often my own default response and I find it bothersome. “Busy” says nothing about how I’m really doing, what is inspiring or challenging me, or what’s making me feel alive.

As I reflect on what being “busy” means to me, I realize it is more a reflection of the quantity of things facing me. My other default response is “good,” which belies a frequent feeling of overwhelm from the staggering multiplicity of inputs in my daily life. Admitting this is a level of vulnerability that I’m not always quick to offer.

An overflow of information

It is estimated that 225 billion emails are sent and received worldwide each day. Add to that the number of texts or instant messages, pings from Facebook and other social media sites, calls from friends and colleagues, and more—there is a deluge of information coming at us every day. It’s hard to keep up! Some days I spend a majority of my working hours just managing email. I have friends who don’t even try and, instead, simply delete their entire inbox and start fresh every few months. That initially felt crazy to me, but as my inbox count rises, I’m beginning to wonder if this is actually a reasonable strategy.

Our minds are also full. In a recent neuroscience workshop created by Dr. Joe Dispenza, I learned that we have 60-70,000 thoughts a day. And, alarmingly, 90 percent of those thoughts are recurring, a churning rooted in the past or in the future. Constantly “on” is the new normal, and we’ve become chronically busy. Thomas Merton, famed writer and theologian, describes this busy-ness as a kind of violence: “To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence.”

Omid Safi, Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, goes as far as to describe being “busy” as a disease: “This disease of being ‘busy’ (and let’s call it what it is, the dis-ease of being busy, when we are never at ease) is spiritually destructive to our health and well-being. It saps our ability to be fully present with those we love the most in our families, and keeps us from forming the kind of community that we all so desperately crave.”

In short, being constantly busy harms us.

Chronic busyness leads to chronic stress

For many, chronic busyness can lead to chronic stress. “Human beings aren’t designed to expend energy continuously,” says Tony Schwartz, founder of The Energy Project. Our bodies and minds need rest to renew, refresh, reflect and focus. Contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t help our work productivity either, especially when we’re busy with the wrong things.

Recently, I had a helpful reminder of the importance of taking time to rest. On my drive into work I miraculously beat traffic and arrived 30 minutes early for a meeting. It was a gorgeous California day and, with this unexpected luxury of time, I decided to grab a cuppa joe, take a breather and catch some sun. I closed my eyes and found myself breathing more deeply. My shoulders dropped, my jaw relaxed and my energy shifted as I settled in. The time felt expansive and spacious. I felt a little more alive and energized, and the anxious thoughts I had about the upcoming meeting evolved into excitement about its creative possibilities. Sadly, this is not how my busy days normally play out.

Build in space

There is a term for the kind of unexpected spaciousness I found that morning: yutori. Poet Naomi Shehab Nye learned this word from a Japanese student. It is like “leaving early enough to get somewhere so that you know you’re going to arrive early, so when you get there, you have time to look around.” With yutori, life becomes more like a poem. Naomi’s post in OnBeing (Krista Tippett’s popular podcast and blog series) reflected on the ways you might view your life as a poem. Her student eloquently further explained, “When you think, when you’re in a very quiet place, when you’re remembering, when you’re savoring an image, when you’re allowing your mind calmly to leap from one thought to another, that’s a poem. That’s what a poem does.”

The poetry of my busy days feels rapid-fire and chaotic, not very legible nor beautiful. Sure, it is poetry, but not the kind of poem I ideally want my life to be. When I consider the immense benefits I quickly enjoyed that one morning, I see that my life can be a more enlivening and inspired overall experience. To achieve this kind of poetry in your own life and create more yutori, try the following:

Arriving early for an appointment is just one form of intentional spaciousness. How can you create more yutori in your life?

This post originally appeared on blog.whil.com.

Photo credit: itman__47, Thinkstock