Space to breathe
Business needs a new foundational anchor to replace its reverence to the hustle.
The word "business" originates from the Old English word "bisignes", which means "anxiety" or "the state of being busy".
Being busy...producing lots of busy-ness was / is a recognised metric for any business.
But is quantity of work still the endgame?
Now that machines are able to churn out more work volume than we possibly have use for, isn't the element of scarcity most in demand now 'work that has impact'?
Impactful work is not produced by volume; it doesn't come from busyness.
Rather it comes from the mental depth that we are able to reach only in a place of calm.
When given space to breathe - free from the drone of traffic, devoid of the distraction of online noise, and the 'urgent' tasks that need to be completed...only then are we able to access ideas of impact.
Being in a state of anxious busyness may have been ideal at some point, but past a certain threshold all of that accumulating noise just leads to confusion and burnout.
Business needs a new foundational anchor to replace its reverence to the hustle. It should rather be engineered around a space to breathe.