Nowadays, people don't ask you how you are, they say, 'Are you busy?' meaning, 'Are you well?' If someone actually does ask you how you are, the most cheerful answer, of course, is a robust 'Busy!' to which the person will reply 'Good!'
Far too many people hide behind their busy lifestyles
We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness.
I don't know that anyone in the United States is taught to rest.
The English are busy folk; they have no time in which to be polite.
Down time is not the name of the game.
In our production-oriented society, being busy, having an occupation, has become one of the main ways, if not the main way, of identifying ourselves. Without an occupation, not just our economic security but our very identity is endangered.
Too many people, too many demands, too much to do; competent, busy, hurrying people - It just isn't living at all.
Lunch is for wimps.
Let's be honest; it's rather easy to be busy. We all can think up a list of tasks that will overwhelm our schedules. Some might even think that their self-worth depends on the length of their to-do list. They flood the open spaces in their time with lists of meetings and minutia - even during times of stress and fatigue.
Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.
I'm not suggesting that the entire nation can't be successful, but there's something to it when you have 150 cable channels and the Internet at your fingertips and video games and all kinds of ADD-addled devices like my iPhone and your BlackBerry and things that keep us busy.
[W]e spend so much time staring at our phones and screens, texting and tweeting about how busy we are, we no longer have the time to consume any primary material. We rely instead on the casual observations of our “friends” or the people we “follow” […].
Not being busy is something I worry about, but I think work begets work.
I find in L.A. that you ask people how they're doing, and the immediate answer is, 'Oh, I'm very busy,' as if busy is the goal.
Some of us find 'relaxing' to be, in itself, nerve-racking. If we aren't doing something useful or, at least, that seems useful, we feel guilty, impatient, and mortal.
Lucy Kellaway's columns in the 'Financial Times' lend themselves to podcasts because they usually consist of her giving a brisk ticking off to some CEO or subversively wondering whether we're really as busy as we pretend we are.
Everybody is now so busy teaching that nobody has any time to learn.
Doing nothing means unplugging from the compulsion to always keep ourselves busy, the habit of shielding ourselves from certain feelings, the tension of trying to manipulate our experience before we even fully acknowledge what that experience is.
Faffing, of course, does not fit the programme. We are supposed to be busy, productive citizens.
Most executives I know are so action-oriented, or action-addicted, that time for reflection is the first casualty of their success.
Our attention span is shot. We've all got Attention Deficit Disorder or ADD or OCD or one of these disorders with three letters because we don't have the time or patience to pronounce the entire disorder. That should be a disorder right there, TBD - Too Busy Disorder.
In New York, if you spend a few hours doing nothing, you feel like the whole world passed you by.
I don't know when the cult of conspicuous busyness began, but it has swept up almost all the upwardly mobile, professional women I know. Already, it is getting hard to recall the days when, for example, 'Let's have lunch' meant something other than 'I've got more important things to do than talk to you right now.
We're too busy communicating to think, too busy communicating to connect, and sometimes we're too busy communicating to create. This is true for individuals and also true for organizations.
