My To-Do List has To-Do Lists — On Being Busy vs. Being Successful

Another day dawns, and I realize it's going to be a busy one. As always, I go into the day with a seemingly endless "to-do list," which will only grow longer, in the course of the day.

When I stop working — probably around 11:00pm tonight — many of the things on that list will not have been done, and rather than feeling a sense of accomplishment and that I have "gained on it," I will most likely feel like I just "ran in place" and that whatever I accomplished with not enough.

The Self-Employment Hamster Wheel

Many people who become self-employed choose this path as a means to escape the "traditional" hamster wheel of some corporate job, or other occupation that leaves them feeling like their work is meaningless, and they have to work too hard, for too little reward."

The sad truth is that these "hamster wheels" of busy-ness for little reward exist pretty much everywhere.

The trouble with being busy is that we often end up being busy with a lot of meaningless things. For example, we feel like we "must" attend various so-called "Business Networking Opportunities" where we actually end up standing around for three hours talking to people whose sole mission is to try to sell us dodgy network marketing programs or timeshares in Acapulco... that don't actually exist.

My point here is... pretty much everyone at a networking event tends to be there to sell and nobody is there to buy or even look for goods or services.

What "BUSY" Often MEANS, in the Lives of the Self-Employed...

One of the problems/challenges many entrepreneurs and self-employed individuals face is that we are pretty bad at prioritizing what we need to get done.

And — somehow — we make ourselves "victims" of the inaccurate belief that as long as we are busy, it must mean we are working on something, which means we are building our success!

Don't get me wrong, I often catch myself in this pattern, even though I definitely know better. I like to call it the "Cleaning My Desk So I Can Do My Work Syndrome."

95% of the time, it's little more than wasting time.

We do things for reasons that often feel legitimate, but effectively and functionally are not. They relate to personal and business "image," and sometimes to our own misguided sense of what "being in business for yourself" entails.

Remember, stop and take stock of what you are doing, and stick to doing the things that actually have a direct bearing on furthering your line of work!

Remember Changing Conditions and Revisiting What You Are Doing!

Part of the problem is also that we tend to get into patterns where we do things because they they used to be a relevant part of our lives.

Let me give you a super simple and in-context example:

I used to create 2-3 blog posts on Steemit pretty much every single day. I did so, because — at the time — that would add $40-50 a day to my income. As such, I could justify the time spent writing blog posts as "materially contibuting" to my life.

Today, the world of Steem has changed to where I have had to move Steeming from "income" to "entertainment."

Whereas it would be really nice to be able to spend 3-4 hours a day writing, doing so would merely keep me very "busy" but it would not materially help my cause as a self-employed individual.

Over the years, I have had to regularly stop and evaluate whether things and activities I kept on doing — because they seemed important at one time — were still serving me.

And sometimes that can lead to some very difficult (business) decisions — such as deciding that a certain small business you have may simply not be viable anymore, pure as a result of changing market conditions.

For example, I gave up being a contract technical writer because I could not compete with people with Masters degrees in English from US and British universities, who were living in South-East Asia where the cost of living is much lower.

But you have to be willing to make those difficult decisions, or you end up on that "busy-ness hamster wheel" without doing yourself any good!

Success is something we reach when what we do matters, rather than simply because we are busy!

Thank you for reading!

(Another #creativecoin creative non-fiction post, also submitted to the Intrepreneur tribe)

Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment-- share your experiences-- be part of the conversation!

(As usual, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly for this platform.)
Created at 190920 08:54 PDT
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