For a long time, I thought motion was evidence of progress.
If my days were full, I assumed they were valuable.
If my calendar was packed, I felt relevant.
If I was tired by the evening, I believed I had earned that fatigue.
Busyness felt like proof. Proof that I mattered. Proof that I was moving forward. Proof that I wasn’t wasting time.
But busyness is deceptive. It creates the illusion of importance without asking a harder question: important to what?
It fills hours, not direction.
It replaces intention with activity.
It gives the comfort of motion while quietly removing responsibility for outcomes.
At some point, I started noticing a pattern that didn’t fit the story I was telling myself.
The days I remembered most clearly were rarely the busiest ones.
They were slower.
Quieter.
Less crowded with tasks, but heavier with meaning.
Those days usually had one defining feature: a single decision made well.
Real progress doesn’t announce itself with noise. It happens when attention is allowed to stay in one place long enough to matter. One focused hour, protected from distraction, can outperform an entire day spent reacting.
Busyness often isn’t about productivity at all. It’s about avoidance.
Avoiding hard choices.
Avoiding saying no.
Avoiding the discomfort of admitting that some things don’t deserve space in your life anymore.
When everything is urgent, nothing is examined.
The moment you stop trying to look productive, your days begin to change shape.
You stop overplanning.
You leave room between things.
You become more selective about where your energy goes.
And something unexpected happens: your work improves, even as you do less.
There is no status in exhaustion, even though society rewards it.
Being constantly busy doesn’t mean you’re needed.
More often, it means your boundaries are weak and your priorities are unclear.
The goal was never an empty schedule.
It was a clear one.
A day where effort is visible, not scattered.
Where energy moves in a direction instead of leaking everywhere at once.
Where you can point to what mattered and know why it did.
Doing less, intentionally, isn’t laziness.
It’s respect for time — yours and everyone else’s.
And once you experience that clarity, it becomes very hard to confuse movement with progress again.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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