[Mountain_Skies]

A while back I took a couple years off from working. Sometimes I'd still find myself saying "I've just been too busy" when asking myself why I didn't get something done. Didn't take long to realize that "I'm too busy" had been an excuse I had been using to justify poorly thought out priorities. I still haven't fully broken the "I'm too busy" pattern but at least now I know there's a decent chance that I haven't actually been too busy and I need to look more at what it is that I have been doing and whether or not those things are truly more important than whatever I was "too busy" to do.

[PcChip]

Agreed, sometimes you can literally replace the phrase with "it's not important to me" and shock yourself

[MattGaiser]

Yep. A lot of the times I don't care about something, I use the time excuse.

[scruple]

My brother retired in his mid-40s. He has the same problem. He was a chef and had spent 2 decades working himself to the bone, genuinely being too busy to get things done. In retirement, he became "the busiest unemployed person I know" and hearing that a few times helped to snap him out of it.

[zelphirkalt]

One has to be fair to oneself too though. Most of us could probably do more in a day's time, than we do. There are consequences though, if one goes to the max for a time. For example we could learn a lot and get a better paid job. However, we might lose some friends, because we did not put any time into interacting with them instead of learning a lot. Just as an example.

So cut yourself some slack too. The balance of that might not be obvious.