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For me, the antidote to busyness is remembering to be mindful and to practice being focused, engaged, and spacious. What does this mean?

FOCUSED: See what matters most, your ground truth, your creative gap, the most important thing, and focus on that. Come back, over and over, to the simple, yet difficult question: What is my priority right now? What is the most important thing to accomplish in this call, this day, this week?

ENGAGED: This refers to your level of energy and attention. Whatever the task, engage with it fully till it’s time to move to a new task. In general, I find I can remain fully engaged with tasks in forty-five- to ninety-minute increments, then it helps to take a short break of five or ten minutes. When working, engage with your full energy, then completely disengage and relax.

SPACIOUS: This refers to bringing your attention away from concerns about yourself and noticing the space and openness, literally, that exists around you, wherever you are. At the same time, notice stress without becoming stressed. Expect stress, anxiety, and fear to arise at times, and let them go when they do. Studies show that stress and busyness aren’t the real problem; the problem is our relationship with stress. In one study, people who believed that stress was inevitable and positive had greater well-being than those who believed that stress was negative and something to be avoided. Further, those who had a positive attitude about stress lived longer than those who experienced relatively little stress in their lives.

LesserSeven Practices of a Mindful Leader
p.181-182

Related Quotes

There are moments where you simply cannot function as a human, never mind a leader, and you need to recognize them and walk out the door. Don’t make a bad decision because you’re frustrated and overworked—get your head on straight and come in fresh the next day.

None of this is revolutionary. You probably learned it in elementary school: write down a list of what you need to do, take a deep breath and some quiet time if you’re upset, eat your vegetables, exercise, sleep. But you’ll forget. We all forget. So grab your calendar and make a plan. You’ll be working all the time for a while. That’s okay. It’s not forever. But you’ve probably been beating at your problems with the same hammer for too long— it’s time for your brain to rummage around and find a crowbar. Or a bulldozer. Give your mind some time to breathe.

FadellBuild
p.217

Instead I said, “We don’t do busy. We aspire to work in a way that is focused, engaged, and spacious.

LesserSeven Practices of a Mindful Leader
p.181

Seasoned meditation involves the interplay of concentration and mindfulness; both are cultivated from the start. It is very difficult to stay mindfully attentive to rapidly changing elements of experience, for instance, without the buildup of sufficient concentration, so most meditators in the Buddhist traditions are using both techniques at different times, oscillating between the two modes of attention.

EpsteinThe Zen of Therapy
p.42

What my meditation teachers have shared with me is that meditation is about choosing where my attention goes. Training my attention. And that when I am overcome by sadness, loss, anger, joy, desire, restlessness, or other emotions, it helps to be able to drop into myself and choose—to be with the emotions intentionally, to listen for what is needed. This has been a path into emergent strategy—the more I listen, the more I understand the interconnectedness of the world, and my place in it, my insignificance, my wholeness, our collective potential and beauty.

BrownEmergent Strategy
p.200

This cognitive ability to remember the past and anticipate the future is one reason some of us feel so busy—not because of the number of tasks we have to complete in the day, but because of the sheer number of things competing for our attention. What is commonly called “distraction” is probably better understood as overstimulation.

Recent findings in neuroscience have shown that our conscious minds cannot do more than one thing at a time. It may feel like you are able to multitask and think about two (or more) things at once, but really your mind is switching between them. This is a costly process neurologically speaking. Switching from one task to another takes energy and a measurable amount of time. Then, when we switch back, it takes another period of time to really wrap our minds around the original object of attention. And it’s not only about the time cost; it’s about the quality of our attention. If we are always switching from one thing to another, then we are never able to truly focus and experience the pleasure and effectiveness of a focused mind. Instead we live in a state of constant recalibration, or what the writer Linda Stone perceptively calls “continuous partial attention.”

Human awareness is not the speedy, nimble creature some of us believe it to be. Our brains have evolved to be more like owls than hummingbirds: we notice something, turn our attention to it, and focus in. It is in this state of intense, solitary focus that we are in possession of our most uniquely human and powerful mental faculties. When we focus on one thing, we are at our most thoughtful, creative, and productive.

But in the screen-heavy environment of the twenty-first century, our mind-owls, large and unwieldy, are treated like hummingbirds, and they end up flopping ineffectively from one thing to the next. Doing this day in and day out accommodates us to what is actually an unnatural, anxiety-producing mode in which the mind struggles to find nourishment.

Which owl is going to feel busier, the one focusing on the sound of a mouse in the snow, or the one trying to draw tiny bits of nectar from a thousand flowers? And which owl is going to be, in the end, better nourished?

Waldinger, SchulzThe Good Life
p.123-124