Greg Faxon argues that busyness masks what actually matters. He calls the habit of doing email and social media instead of real work "creative avoidance," and says silence forces you to face the anxiety underneath. Quiet space is where you find your actual priorities.
If you want to be more productive, stop doing so much stuff. Before I made this video, I turned off the AC unit, and it got really quiet, and I realized how much noise there had been in the background. So often we create extra noise. We're on Facebook, we check email, and we're so frightened to just sit in that silence for a second. And sometimes that's all it would take for you to figure out, what's that thing you've been avoiding. I talk a lot about creative avoidance, the idea that we do a lot of peripheral stuff because we're scared of going directly into the thing that really matters, that's really meaningful to us. And the only way that creative avoidance can continue to thrive is in the midst of busyness and in the midst of noise. But. But the problem is, in our modern culture, we're so stimulated and we have so much technology at our fingertips that allow us to escape outside of ourselves that it's really rare to take a pause. And that's why when you're stopped at a stoplight, you're checking your email and you're checking Facebook, because it's so difficult to be silent. If you really took a second, you'd have to feel all of the stuff that was bubbling up under the surface, all of the fear, all of the anxiety that you're able to push down with distraction. But it's only by creating the space to feel that stuff that you actually figure out what matters most, and that's the key to productivity.
