Busy and Scattered

“How are you doing?”

“Good, super-busy with work, how about you?”

We hear this dialog as though it’s a good, normal, acceptable thing.

And if you care about your work, perhaps it’s you making the latter statement.

I know I can be (I’ve not taken a vacation in over fifteen years!)

What struck me today, was when Marcus Aurelius wrote in his third book of meditations, “Be a person of few words and a few projects, not busy and scattered.”

‘Busy’, and ‘scattered’, used in the same sentence, almost interchangeably.

It makes sense:

Someone who “waffles on” has too many words to say, whereas someone who “states” something has just the right amount of words.

Someone who is “busied” usually has to deal with many things. Were they to only have a small number of things to do, we might refer to them as “focused”.

Next time you consider describing yourself as “busy”, consider swapping the word out for “scattered”, and see what it does for your work.