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You may find yourself neck-deep in looming tasks that need to be done.
Whether in your professional or personal life, you will need to prioritize things which hold higher importance over those which can wait to be done later. In your efforts to prioritize, you will need to reject, decline, and postpone invitations from others. Whether it is an invitation to go out for dinner, or an invitation for your efforts on a task at work, you will find yourself in a position to decline because of how much you have on your plate.
In these situations, there are a myriad ways in which you can decline the invitations of others that wouldn’t hurt their feelings towards you. However, the only mistake which you should avoid at all costs is mentioning the fact of you being too busy to commit to their propositions. Do not bring up the fact that you are busy in conversations with others. It does not bring benefit to your cause, and is almost a sure-fire way of giving birth to negative feelings in the mind of your listener.
Humans Compete
Introducing the fact that you are too busy for an invitation of another will give birth to competitive feelings within them. Even if the topic at hand is by no-means a competitive one, the fact that you have other commitments during the specific time another person wanted your presence to align with theirs, tells them that your time is more valuable. Complaining about the fact that your are too busy is a form of communicating how valuable your time must be. You may not be conscious about this message that you send, but know that it exists.
You may have noticed that people will begin to mention how busy they are as well, once you mention your state of being busy. Their desire to one-up you made it into auditory reality, and you should know that those competitive feelings will exist in most who you mention this to.
Stating that you are busy will lower the chances of successfully continuing a working relationship with those who you reject. They will feel inadequate when they are around you, and will know that you believe your time to be more important than theirs.
You Actually Enjoy Being Busy – So Don’t Complain About It
Complaining about how busy we are is a method of vindicating our desire to be successful. You like being busy, because if you didn’t, you wouldn’t put yourself in positions that force you to be. Being busy is a sign of things moving along in your life, and even if those things are unproductive (such as dealing with a death in the family), you show that you are working to put chaos into order – a respectable task in itself.
People who you complain to understand the fact that you put yourself in the position that you’re in, and therefore must be accepting of the circumstances that come with your desire for success. You burden your listener with a baseless complaint which you are perpetuating through your actions but condemning with your words.
If you are truly too busy and find yourself being negatively affected by that fact, then take the necessary steps to fix it. Letting others know about the fact of you being busy is not a beneficial step to mitigating your issue. Always decline the invitations from others in ways other than stating that you are too busy. Simply say, “that time doesn’t work for me, let’s try to find another day,” if you run out of excuses.