This morning I got a message from a marketing person. This same person has been sending me messages now for several weeks. The tone of the messages has been getting increasingly irritated. This morning the message read something to the effect, “Mr. Reams, clearly you are too busy to respond to my very important inquiry, I will contact you in 1 month when you might have more time to pay attention to me.”
This got me thinking. He was making the claim that I was too busy to respond to him, which must be the reason because what he has to talk to me about is super important. Then a realization dawned on me. Nobody is more or less busy than anyone else. We are all exactly the same amount of busy. We all have the exact same amount of time in one week, 168 hours. What is different is what we choose to spend that time on.
So the correct response from this marketing person, is not Mr. Reams, you must be too busy. Rather, it is clearly Mr. Reams you chose to spend your time this week focusing on things you felt were more important than responding to me. Could I convince you that a 5 minute conversation with me would be of enough benefit that you can prioritize that over other activities?
You see busy is a myth. There is no busy, there is only what you chose to do with your time. We all have the same amount of time. For example, I chose to run about 12 hours out of my 168 this last week. So 7% of my time was spent running. I spent 49 hours sleeping. That was 29% of the time. I spent 32 hours on Skype/Teams/Webex calls. I will not bore you further with the details, but needless to say, I was just as busy as you were. The question is not one of busy, the question is one of priority.
Jeff Bezoz, the Dalai Lama, Martin Licis, Usain Bolt and Donald Trump all spent the same amount of time last week that I did. 168 hours. The question is really, what am I going to do with the next 168. That starts tonight at midnight. I will spend the first 5 hours of the week sleeping. What will I do with the remaining 163?
Guy Reams
