Edel Coffey: a heightened state of 'busyness' after Covid
Edel Coffey: "Tasks seem to propagate, Tetris-like, one after the other"
Tomorrow is the beginning of May. The fifth month of the year. Fifth! I don’t know about you, but I’d like to request an inquiry into what happened to the first four months of 2022. If we were rounding things up, you could even go so far as to say that the year is nearly half way over.
The children have a mere eight weeks of school left before the summer holidays. Surely, having lost two years to the pandemic, time should be moving at a more leisurely, accommodating pace, pottering along in order to allow us to ease ourselves back into life as we once knew it, rather than this breakneck, water park slide pace at which we seem to have re-entered the world.
I understand that we have lost time to make up for, but this is ridiculous. I haven’t even come up with goals for 2022 yet. Seriously, what just happened?
It seems the world of busyness has returned. I remember being gifted a beautiful diary in 2021 and feeling a little pang at how sad it was that it would remain empty, unused. At that point in the pandemic, a diary honestly felt like an ancient artefact to me, something that primitive mankind used to keep track of a busy life.
I don’t think I ever thought the world of busy would return. But here we are, back and in need of daily reminders, planners, more hours in the day, and new ways to get more organised.
There is a heightened sense of busyness in the world since we have come out of lockdown and back to the world as we once knew it.
Part of that is to do with the fact that we are genuinely busy again and part of it is to do with the fact that we have forgotten how to deal with being busy, forgotten how time-consuming and tiring it is.
That’s what the to-do list feels like these days. But I’ve always found organisation a soothing way to deal with busyness – write it all down on a page, get it all in order and order will follow.
And I’m not the only one, it seems. Last week, I heard the young businesswoman, Ashley McDonnell, on the Ryan Tubridy show, talking about the art of organisation and planning.
McDonnell is a very impressive young woman from Galway who has risen as a technologist to the top of the luxury industry through sheer determination (and likely a lot of talent) but she gave credit to her upbringing playing GAA and the skills playing sport taught her about setting goals, and putting in place an action plan to achieve those goals. If you don’t make an action plan, your dreams will remain dreams, she said.
She got me thinking about the importance of being organised in our lives, not just on the big goals, but on the smaller stuff too. Making a list, big or small, brings a sense of control, however false, to our lives.
Ticking tasks off your list, whether that’s world domination or folding the laundry, brings a sense of order and achievement to our day. When we’re busy, keeping track of the many tasks can help things to feel less out of control.
People tell me I’m an organised person but I think the truth is I am a disorganised person with a diary, and a slew of phone alerts that keep me on the straight and narrow. And I’m not at the level of organisation of, say, food planning and meal prepping.
I’d like to be the kind of person who knows on a Sunday what we’ll be having for dinner the following Thursday but, if I’m totally honest, my attempts at meal prepping in the past have amounted to boiling two chicken breasts and putting them in a bowl in the fridge, where I then watched them become less and less appealing over the course of a week.
I think we all have different needs when it comes to busyness, organisation and feeling in control of our own lives. I’ve known people who appear to live and work in chaos and yet have the most clear-thinking, organised minds and vice versa.
As busyness increases, it’s good to keep a handle on things with a certain level of organisation. But at the same time, too much organisation can become counterproductive, feeling like another onerous task to add to your busy list.Some super-organisers will schedule everything from self-care, water intake, exercise, how many steps to take in a day, friendship maintenance, date nights, family days out, meditation, mindfulness....
We really are all doing far too much, I thought. And then a lightbulb moment happened, what Oprah calls her ‘Aha! moments’. It occurred to me that the key to being super organised as we enter this phase of renewed busyness was simple. Don’t do too much.
