Busyness is rarely just caused by our immediate necessary actions – busyness, I think, has an awful lot to do with the cognitive load that we place on ourselves.
Having quit my job early this year, it’s never ceased to amaze me how I still feel busy on a regular basis, even though I have plenty of free time. When I really think about it, it would appear this comes from all of the projects and obligations I’ve internalized.
For example, I have some technical books I’ve been going through on network programming, operating systems, bug bounties, the C language, x86 assembly, and a few other books, including a language book on Tibetan, and another on Nepali, which I’ve barely touched.
On the one hand, I love all of these books, and look forward to going through them. On the other hand, that’s an awful lot of material to take on. I always have a backlog.
But while this issue with books has existed for a very long time, busyness appears in other ways, too. For example, when I bought my Nintendo Switch, I bought every game I intended to play on it. However, for the first 6 months of owning the Switch, I don’t believe I played any other game than Xenoblade Chronicles, and maybe one or two evenings of Super Smash Brothers. At the back of my head, I’m often still thinking, “Oh, yeah, I should probably try to play Zelda sometime”. Moreover, I also bought back a few Gameboy Colors and the Pokemon games a few years ago, and although I made it halfway through Pokemon Red, I never finished. More items for the backlog.
And it doesn’t even stop there. Last year I bought a decent amount of photography equipment so I could photograph the pages of the old mining supply catalogs I was collecting and upload those to the Internet Archive. I was proud of what I accomplished (several thousand high-fidelity pages), but the process was tedious and brutal, and I basically swore off doing it again. However, the specter arose that if I were comfortable destroying the remaining books in order to perform much easier uploads, I would actually do it, since the books that really matter to me have already been completed. I actually bought a second copy of one of these books for $25 with the sole intention of removing the binding and feeding the pages through a scanner one at a time, but I need a good paper trimmer to do this, and I just haven’t committed to it. Yet another item to the backlog.
And it’s good to have goals. It’s good to have hobbies. It’s good to be able to look back on accomplishments you’re proud of. Hopefully these computer books actually play a role in my next job, too. But if I had to write out all of the things on my backlog, it would be enormous. And you know what? That sucks.
That’s where my sense of busyness comes from. Sure, everybody has a busy week or two, but I really believe it’s that infinite backlog that burns people out like nothing else. It could be on your shoulders for days, it could be on your shoulders for decades.
I had a fun Lego ice base sci-fi project in the works for a solid decade. I was always collecting bricks here and there for it, plotting it out, wondering how I could do this or that. But then I woke up one day and realized that I had been dreading it for longer than I could remember. It no longer appealed to me the way it had in my early 20s, so I donated all of the pieces I had collected for that project and completely released it. It was great.
Anyway, it’s not there isn’t value to these things that we establish for ourselves, but I have to wonder what this year would have been like with absolutely nothing on my shoulders. I’m not convinced you need that when taking a big year off, though, I think that’s something that would simply be nice to experience once or twice a year, or to have a smaller backlog that never feels overwhelming. Imagine having even just one month in which nothing is planned and there are no self-induced obligations. Tough to imagine, huh?