Anesthetic Action

What if your busyness were a distraction from what really matters?  Just as overthinking can be a way to anesthetize ourselves, so too over-acting or being busy can be an anesthetic. We numb ourselves with doing many small things in order to avoid the pain of taking the actions that would have the biggest impact. Being busy allows us to feel like we’re doing something. Actually, even more than something; we get to feel like we’re doing a lot!  

In the book Straight Line Leadership, Djusan Djukich offers this question to cut through the flurry of ineffective busyness: “What’s the most powerful action that I can take right now?”

You may be thinking that this concept doesn’t apply to your life. Maybe you’re thinking that you’re already doing all you can do and being busy is just how things are. If this is the case, I invite you to slow down. 

My wife just read the chapter of Straight Line Leadership that inspired this letter, and she also had trouble seeing how this applied to her context. We examined three areas: making our home beautiful, forming our children, and doing the laundry. In each of the areas, our lives are busy. For each of the areas, we were able to discover a “next required action” that would be a game-changer. Each of these actions has some short-term difficulty, but each would also lead to substantial time saved and improved quality of life. 

This week, I invite you to ask:

On a scale of 1-7, how busy is my life? What areas of my life  are leading to the busyness? On a scale of 1-7, how certain am I that I am taking the most powerful actions in these areas? What will I do to change this? 

God bless,
Dan