The Cult of Busy

by Jamey Mann, Catoctin School of Music

Something that frustrates me as a teacher is the excuse “I’m sooooo busy”. Which to me does not change the fact that you did not practice, you made no progress, and the student is getting frustrated by lack of progress. This is a trend that I’ve noticed getting worse and it may be true that you’re busy. However, it is not an excuse to not get your work done, show up late, or not show up at all.

In the professional world it does not matter if you’ve overextended yourself and you’re showing up to my rehearsal late and unprepared. You do this enough then I will seriously reconsider working with you or just fire you. This extends to all professions. Although we want to take every opportunity to help make connections and further our careers it does not matter if you are letting the people you are working with down in the present moment.

Students that are 9- and 10-year-old have tried to give me this excuse for not practicing which I am sure is learned from the parents (children this young are not and should not be that busy). If students, this young are so busy they cannot fit in a few minutes a day to practice their instrument than they need some activities removed from their schedule. Children should be taught to manage their schedules responsibly. Even though they may want to do every activity under the sun does not mean they have the maturity to understand what taking on all these responsibilities means. This applies to adults as well.

Here are a few tips to help get out of the cycle of busy excuses and streamline a schedule.

1.     Prioritize- What you need to do, what you want to do, and what is just another activity? An average student needs to go to school and do their schoolwork, they may have a sport or another physical activity they enjoy (sports and other physical activities are important) then maybe music or art, etc. However, does the student need to do all these activities in addition to several others? At some point the student stops excelling at any of these hobbies and they just turn into time wasters. I would rather a student stop their music lessons if it meant they had time to pursue and excel at a hobby they are more excited about.

2.     Make some cuts- Once identified, eliminate the time wasters. This might be hard as they might love social time with friends and genuinely like the activity. However, they need to learn that if they do not have time to dedicate, they might be letting those friends down and not make progress in whatever it may be.

3.     Small time wasters – This is something we are all guilty of. Aimlessly scrolling through social media, watching tv/playing video games, staying up too late, etc. It is particularly frustrating when a student claims to be too busy, however they are scrolling through social media in the waiting room. This is the time that you can be practicing or warming up. All these little things waste large amounts of time. It is a good idea for everyone to get control of them.

I do not want this to come as too harsh, but it is disheartening to see students that have potential struggle unnecessarily. I’ve seen it stress out students to the point where they are close to burn out and get too stressed over something that should be enjoyable. Unfortunately, many seem to think that busy means productive when in reality, it just leads to higher levels of stress, anxiety and lack of meaningful moments.