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The Art of Being Un-Busy

Because being busy doesn’t mean being productive.

Isabel Nyo
5 min readJun 20, 2018
“A clock, a notebook and a smartphone on a white desk” by freestocks.org on Unsplash

When asked how our weeks or days have been, we often answer, “Crazy busy”! We like to tell others how busy we are, because we’ve been taught to think that we aren’t worthwhile if we aren’t acting busy.

When my husband and I were just dating, we used to eat out a lot. I remember one incident where we visited a restaurant that was nearly empty. When we sat down, we assumed this meant we would be served pretty quickly. But the waitresses seemed very busy — they were literally running from one end of the restaurant to the other — and they took a while to take our order. My husband and I looked at each other and wondered why were they seemed so busy when we could count on one hand the number of occupied tables in the restaurant. The food also took longer than average to arrive and, by the end of our meal, we were more than ready to leave the place with one question in our heads: why were the waitresses acting so busy?

It’s important to take a step back every so often and assess our busyness. Are we busy for good reasons? Are we making an impact and following our dreams? Are we serving our customers better? Are we growing and expanding? For a restaurant, being busy should equal one thing: more customers and, therefore, more profit. Similarly, whether at work or in life, when…

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Isabel Nyo
Isabel Nyo

Written by Isabel Nyo

My course for engineering managers: https://gum.co/emcourse | Tools and Resources for Tech Professionals & Leaders: https://gumroad.com/eisabai

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