How to be less busy and happier?

In particular, up to 74% of people with children under 18 years old said they did not have time to enjoy life.

The solution to over-busyness seems simple: Do less. Research shows that the real reason we get busy is that we take on more than we can handle. So understanding why there’s so little time and so much to do can give you strategies for solving the problem, reducing stress, and becoming happier.

First, researchers found that being busy also brings happiness. Everyone knows that having too little free time reduces happiness, but too much free time also makes people bored and less satisfied with life. Modern people believe that having too much free time is more frightening than having too little.

But in pushing themselves into a state of busyness, most people forget the health risks. The World Health Organization and the International Labor Organization estimate that in 2016, around 398,000 people died from strokes and more than 347,000 died from heart disease worldwide due to working at least 55 hours a week.

A 2021 study by scholars at the University of Pennsylvania and UCLA (USA) estimated that a person needs 9.5 hours of free time per day to be happy. But in reality, the average number of free hours is 1.8 hours per day.

Many people also associate being busy with social and financial status and performance. A 2017 study found that public social media posts about overworked lifestyles were rated higher.

A 2016 study also found that people who are busier have faster processing speeds, better memory and reasoning, and more knowledge than those who are less busy. However, the causal relationship is unclear. People who do well may do more, but some people are better at planning, so even though they are very productive, they still have more free time.

Professor Arthur C. Brooks, author of the "Living Happy" column for the The Atlantic says the solution to being less busy and happier is to understand this trend and be prepared to deal with it.

Carefully monitor your work patterns and commitments over the course of a week. If you have a gap in your schedule, do you squeeze in a low-priority meeting or a previously unfilled task? When you suddenly find yourself with a free hour, do you fill it with calls and emails that don’t need to be made right away? These are telltale signs of idleness aversion.

One solution is to create a list of tasks that are interesting to you but not related to a deadline. For author Brooks, he uses this time to sketch out book ideas in a notebook that he carries with him at all times. When he has a free moment, he takes out the notebook and starts brainstorming. This works well, giving him new ideas and also motivating him to spend more free time.

In addition to being fun, this practice can be revolutionary for your career. Google spends 20% of its engineers’ time on whatever project they want to work on. This free fifth of their time has resulted in more than half of the company’s top-grossing products, including Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Earth.

If your boss doesn't give you this creative time, create it for yourself by being strict in completing your work, then you will have time for your creativity and passion.

Maybe you've tried this advice and still feel hopelessly busy. Here's another effective tip that Brooks learned from a productivity expert.

First, the expert told him to make a list of 20 things he needed to accomplish the next day, in order of priority. Then, she instructed him to choose the top 10 items he needed to do and list them in order of priority. Finally, she told him to cross off the bottom 15 items. The first 5 items on the list were the ones that really needed to be done.

“What about the other stuff?” he asked, and was told, “You don’t need to do it, and no one will really notice or care, because everything else is done so well.”

After a while Brooks found that in most cases, this expert's method was correct and as a result his life improved.