Are your Focused or just Busy?

20 Nov 2014

Tags: bootcamp sydney, bootcamp melbourne, bootcamp brisbane,

Sydney is an incredibly ‘busy’ city. People fill every waking hour with something. Most people can’t even sit and wait for a friend at a café without busying their time checking emails or texts. Many parents are busy multi-tasking their children, if you’re sitting at your desk reading this email… you’re probably also managing to do 2 or 3 other tasks at the same time (even if it is just eating your lunch).

The Minimalists wrote a great blog recently- Not Busy, Focused, and it couldn’t have been more timely. If you haven’t crossed paths with The Minimalists and you’re a bit of a blog follower then get onto them!

My question to you is; How is all this busy-ness impacting on our lives and more importantly our health?

In the age where inflammatory and lifestyle diseases, cancers and mental health disorders are running rife in the Western world you have to question how important it really is to create excess ‘stress,’ taking our body into a constant state of fight or flight in order to ‘survive’ each day?

Joshua Millburn from the Minimalist quotes Henry David Thoreau who famously said, “It is not enough to be busy. The question is: what are we busy about?”

“You see, there is a vast delta between being busy and being focused. The former involves the typical tropes of productivity—anything to keep our hands moving, to keep going, to keep the conveyer belt in motion. Being focused, on the other hand, involves attention, awareness, and intentionality.

The difference, then, is that I don’t commit to a lot of things, but the tasks and people I commit to receive my full attention.”

Think about the last time you stopped, sat quietly in your own space, relaxed, breathed deeply and switched off from the busyness of life. Imagine the huge impact this could have if each and every one of us did this even for 5 minutes everyday- less road rage, less clerical errors, less blaming of others, less yelling at your kids, less stress in general.

I’m no buddha… I’m not great at this myself… but I’m going to make more of an effort to be ok with not filling every second of my day with STUFF.

Written by

Brooke Ferguson