Reasons To Overload

The old say­ing is true, “If you want to get some­thing done, recruit a busy per­son.” Peo­ple that have too much to do get even more done. They know that when the mind faces an impos­si­ble load it will cre­ate pri­or­i­ties and bet­ter meth­ods. They have also dis­cov­ered that the mind finds ways to rest dur­ing some work activ­i­ties from the strains of other activ­i­ties. Per­son­ally, I put sev­eral work projects on the com­puter and switch from one to another. The ideas I need for one project will come up while I am work­ing on another. The mind has far greater capac­i­ties than we real­ize. It is not a mat­ter of willpower or being dri­ven. It is sim­ply a mat­ter of let­ting the mind choose its meth­ods for get­ting things done.

I grew up run­ning var­i­ous kinds of farm machin­ery. Machines run best with a load. They were designed to accom­plish cer­tain kinds of tasks. Engines need to pull against resis­tant forces. Com­plex machines work best when the forces are bal­anced with an appro­pri­ate level of demand. Truck brakes work best when the truck is loaded — not empty. Analo­gies such as these have helped me with my mind. The time between wak­ing up and being at work is min­i­mal, thus I have no trou­ble falling asleep at night (or even at my desk sometimes).

What is most enjoy­able is the way that imme­di­ate work reduces the cul­tural noises around me. Even major news sto­ries get tossed into the trivia bin of my mind. It has bet­ter things to do than digest the details of some dis­tant polit­i­cal scan­dal. It has real things to do that make a real dif­fer­ence in the here and now. “An idol mind is the devil’s workshop” — one of the first wis­dom say­ings you prob­a­bly heard grow­ing up (I sure did). There is some truth in that. We peo­ple were made to cre­ate and accom­plish. Human­ity has been blessed with bills to pay and prob­lems to solve. With too much time on our hands, we cre­ate all sorts of social and men­tal mon­sters. Blessed is the per­son with way to much to get done to be unhappy.

Pas­sive liv­ing is mis­er­able. I have tried it a few times. It goes nowhere. I took a year off in my mid for­ties and found that I had to be almost con­stantly on the road, rid­ing my bicy­cle, walk­ing, read­ing, clean­ing things up, cook­ing, or writ­ing in a spi­ral note­book. There had to be an objec­tive to my exis­tence — even if that objec­tive was watch­ing a sun­set. The verbs of mean­ing­ful real­ity are active.

I work a seven day week because the “load” mixes work with fun. In fact, it is very hard to tell where the line falls between the two — if it does at all. Still­ness sets in when I can­not see the end of the “to do” list. God will send the day to me in an ulti­mately effi­cient man­ner. Inter­rup­tions often prove to be short­cuts. In the end, it is not a mat­ter of merely doing more but of being more in the image of the Creator.