How busy are you really?

Quite often I talk to members who tell me how busy they are – and generally I hear this as part of a sentence where they are saying they haven’t contacted anyone, or can’t arrange to meet anyone, or don’t want to pick up the phone to a new contact…… because they are too busy!

It struck me that this is a bit of an excuse – and as I was talking to my husband about it and discussing how sometimes in our own lives, we feel we are too busy to make the effort to call long distance friends – he said to me that it wasn’t so much of an excuse as about priorities. I guess it’s just different ways of seeing the same thing – and he generally gives people ‘the benefit of the doubt’ more than I do.

OK so maybe it’s a matter of priorities then. So let’s reinterpret what I hear in light of that. This is how I understand it – and perhaps it’s useful for to reflect on this too, if your life is busy.

Most of us are really busy nowadays. And that busyness is generally on worthwhile things to be filling our lives with.  But if you’ve joined an organisation like Heavenly Partners (and paid hard earned cash to do so) and then tell us you’re too busy to do much with your membership, perhaps you need to look at your priorities.

It’d be good to have a close look at what is making you so busy. List on a piece of paper all the things you do that comprise ‘I’m so busy’. There might be lots of different things you do at different times of the day/week – or you might do the same thing on a really regular basis. It doesn’t really matter which is the case just list everything down.

Now it’d be good to step back from your life and analyse what is important to you at this point in your life. Perhaps the No. 1 priority for you is looking after your kids. Perhaps it’s contributing to the life of your church. Perhaps it’s getting fit. It’s your life – your priorities and no-one is making any judgements here.

But you have joined Heavenly Partners so somewhere on that list you should see ‘Find a soul mate’ or something similar.

Now order your priorities according to what is most important for you to achieve. Perhaps getting fit is important to you but not as important as finding a new job or contributing to your church for example. If that’s the case getting fit would sit below these others items on the list.

Once you’ve done that, look at how you are spending your time. Are you spending it according to your priorities. So if getting fit was on your list below finding a new job for example, but you saw you were spending 90% of your time exercising, you’d soon see that something needed to change.

When you’ve done this exercise, you should see where your priority of finding someone special lies.

Now if it’s right at the bottom of your list, then it’s quite fine to keep saying to us and yourself (more importantly) that you’re too busy to contact anyone or meet anyone.

But it’s its not at the bottom of your list, but perhaps in the middle or even somewhere near the top, then it’s time to take stock of what you’re doing in your life and re-evaluate how you are spending your time. Because if you’re spending it doing things that are not top of your priority list, then you certainly won’t be achieving the things you really want in life.

It’s your life – you get to choose how you live it – and what happens – to a greater or lesser extent. You do have to take 100% responsibility though, and that’s where this exercise should help. I’m certainly not making ANY judgements here – just asking you to reflect and be clear on what you want.