8 Quotes Tagged: busyness

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

The greatest enemy of good thinking is busyness.

It is an oyster, with small shells clinging to its humped back. Sprawling and uneven, it has the irregularity of something growing. It looks rather like the house of a big family, pushing out one addition after another to hold its teeming life - here a sleeping porch for the children, and there a veranda for the play-pen; here a garage for the extra car and there a shed for the bicycles. It amuses me because it seems so much like my life at the moment, like most women's lives in the middle years of marriage. It is untidy, spread out in all directions, heavily encrusted with accumulations....

The relentless overload that’s wearing us down is generated by a belief that ‘good’ work requires increasing busyness — faster responses to email and chats, more meetings, more tasks, more hours.

I go amongst the buildings of a city and I see a Man hurrying along - to what?

This philosophy rejects busyness, seeing overload as an obstacle to producing results that matter, not a badge of pride.

Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.