This is a quote from Debbie Millman.
She is a designer, writer, and brand consultant, who has worked with hundreds of the brands we see everyday. She has worked on huge brands such as Colgate, Burger King, and Kleenex.
Of the many, many excuses people use to rationalize why they can’t do something, the excuse “I am too busy” is not only the most inauthentic, it is also the laziest. I don’t believe in “too busy.” I think that busy is a decision. If we say we are too busy, it is shorthand for “not important enough.” It means you would rather be doing something else that you consider more important. That “thing” could be sleep or it could be binge-watching your favorite show. If we use busy as an excuse for not doing something, what, we are really saying is that it’s not a priority.
Too often, I find myself guilty of this trait.
Maybe it’s because I rarely make concrete plans and just go with the flow of the day. Sometimes, people ask me if I’d be game to go out on a specific day a week from now and I can never say yes, or I’d say something like, “ask me on the day itself or the day before.”
I could never commit.
I realize now that it’s silly to live everyday like this, like we’re perpetually “busy” when in fact we’re simply a bit too mindless of our time.
It’s silly because not committing to anything means we forego our shot to make a conscious choice and allow the dictate of circumstance to decide how our days, and eventually our lives, unfold.
The last thing we want is to look back only to imagine all the could-have-beens and should-have-beens that we’d lost to being too “busy.”