S5E54: Why do I feel so busy but nothing is getting done?
Full transcript:
Good morning, happy Thursday, and welcome to the Language Confidence Project, the daily dose of language courage for people who love languages, and those who really don't, but have to learn one anyway. And today's episode is kind of a sister episode to yesterday's, which is called ‘“Am I just wasting my time?”. And in today's episode, I'm answering a question that I've asked myself so many times over the last decade, which is “why am I not making the progress I want with the time I have?” Otherwise put, “why am I being so inefficient? Why do I feel so busy, but the stuff just isn't getting done?”. And today I want to tell you about two quotes that have got me massively unstuck with this problem.
Number one, from Dr. Benjamin Hardy, organizational psychologist and author of 10x is Easier than 2x:
Your time is the biggest indicator of your commitment. You can't hide how you spend your time.
And Shane Parrish, who is an entrepreneur and author of the book, Clear Thinking, he says,
Don't tell me your priorities, show me your schedule.
Don't tell me your priorities, show me your schedule. And that, that is the issue. That's the thing about how we can be tricked into thinking we're pouring time and energy into our goals when we might not be. It's exactly the same thing we talked about yesterday. It's not just about the time we spend moving the bricks around.
It's about whether what we're doing with the bricks aligns with what we're trying to build. It's never just about time allocation to the general activity. It's so much more about where that time is going. And it sounds so simple. And I think that's kind of why I've been grappling with it for so long.
Because, in some ways, it is so simple. And yet, there are just so many ways that that message gets warped in our heads. You know, mental resistance can do that to us. For example,
we think that because our big goal is taking up all our time and energy, it must be contributing towards progress.
Or, we think that thinking about our goal, or talking about our goal, is the same as doing things towards our goal.
But, what if we spend all that time feeling sad about how we're not where we want to be yet? Or, doing an angry post mortem about how far behind we are, and how many opportunities we've missed? Or, how many people have a head start? You know, we are technically in the ballpark of our goal, but it's not counting towards action.
Or, and this is another one that's really common and really easy to miss:
we think that just because we've stripped all the fun and all the leisure out of our life, we must be putting all our time and energy into our goals. Because we certainly feel stressed and burnt out enough, and we don't have time to do the things that we want to do.
And I don't know about you, but I am just so good at having an existential crisis in front of my work, and ruminating in the presence of my work, and then being baffled that the hours I put in didn't get the work done. My brain just didn't seem to recognise for the longest time that even though there was an absence of doing everything else, and even though all the anguish that I felt followed the general theme of work, I wasn't actually doing the work.
So if this is something you've been wondering about too, it might be worth doing a bit of an audit over the next few days. And finding out how much of your work time is work and how much of it is work themed stress. And how much of your busy days is work and how much of it is work themed sacrifice. And there are so many things you might be doing instead: hating work, questioning work, avoiding work, picking apart the work you've already done, whatever it looks like for you. Is that what's happening in the place of action? And then, how can we make that better? Well, I've got a few suggestions here, and I'm quite sure there will be some more episodes about this to follow.
But it might be worth working in really quick bursts, maybe 15 minutes at a time, 20 minutes at a time, on the days when you're struggling with this the most, so that you can't disappear down those rabbit holes of doom, you just don't have the time. It might also be worth breaking everything down into really tiny micro goals, literally itemising every step of the task and adding tick boxes from open the book or write the title so that you have to keep ticking them off, and you're less likely to get sidetracked by the enormity of the task as a whole.
Because I know that the constant mental chatter while you work is really annoying. But language learners, please know that this is a battle that so many of us are fighting. And it's normal, and there are so many little things you can do to make sure that it will never stop you from achieving your goals.
I also know how easy it is to feel like we don't have control over our time, and it does also lead to resentment when we then can't use the time we have in the way we want. But from today, I so hope for you that you feel like you've got that bit of extra control over the time you've already set aside for the things you want to do.
I've put the quotes in the show notes for this episode, just in case you want to stick them on your wall like I have, but don't forget too that the full transcripts for each episode are available on my website at www. languageconfidenceproject.com and that is also in the show notes. Good luck today, you can do this, and I will see you for our final episode of the week tomorrow.