Busyness Competitions

Inspired by this post on Raising Master Max 

 

As Cherie mentioned, there seems to be this need to one-up people or compete about how busy you are. To me, there are two main aspects to busyness:

 

Venting

 

Look, we all need to vent & brain dump every now & again. It’s healthy. It lets frustrations out & once they’re gone, that whittles down the actual issues that need our attention.

 

If you vent to the wrong person, it probably can come across as busyness one-up-man-ship, even if that’s not at all how you meant it.

 

Personal blogging is a great way to vent, in my opinion! My recent brain dump came on a hospital appointment day. Not surprisingly, these days are ones that always make me stressed and anxious. Posting that cleared my mind & allowed me to actually relax a little during the rest of the day.

 

Competitors

 

Basically, people I avoid. I have no desire to compete with you. Maybe you want to be that busy. Maybe you want to be less busy but think that keeping up with the Jones’ is important.

 

Whatever reason it is that you just HAVE to compete, I agree with Cherie’s sentiment of saying “wow, you’re so busy, good luck” or something similarly positive and then closing out the conversation as quickly as possible.

 

 

But what happens if you have to see this person day in, day out & this conversation comes up all the time?

 

I had this a few years ago with a colleague who always wanted to be acknowledged as the most important, busiest and anything else ist possible. We were locked in our building one day due to security issues, which naturally brought TV cameras too. This person wanted to go downstairs to get on TV in case they picked up a date that way. This sent me into massive eye-rolls.

 

I can be sarcastic. What I ended up doing was using a snark shield on this person. It ranged from them telling me how busy they were and me going “chill dude, you’ll have a heart attack at 40 if you’re that busy” to “OMG WHY would you want to do that!?” and looking disgusted.

 

Probably not the most mature response but some situations in life require a bit of a shield and as this person was around me a lot, it’s what worked for me.

 

How do you deal with busyness competitions?