Why We’re All Too Busy—And How It’s Hurting Our Relationships

Sometimes I stumble across a children's book that convicts me, but I never expected to identify with a story about a preoccupied pigeon. The book "Much Too Busy," by John Bond is about a big-city bird—with an even bigger ego—who’s so busy he can’t find his way home. He stumbles across a contemplative mouse who offers help but is too distracted to acknowledge him. The story hit way too close to home. If I were the pompous pigeon, wearing a bowler hat and carrying a briefcase, my kids would be the mice. Something needed to change.

I’ve always been comfortable being busy. Actually, I become a little restless if I don’t have enough to do, and with two toddlers—15 months apart—I’d spent the last three years being really, really busy. Too busy prepping dinner to sit down for breakfast. Too busy tidying bedrooms to read books. At any given moment, I’d double or triple-booked my way through the day. In my defense, my professional years were shaped by a journalistic culture where speed and industriousness were king.

For most adults, being “booked and busy” is a badge of honor, carrying certain implications about our talent and worth. But there is a dark side to productivity, particularly when it eats away at our attention, energy, and the reserves set aside for family, friends, and self-reflection. It’s here that we find busyness' biggest deception: distraction. They say, “If the devil can’t destroy you, he’ll distract you,” because it’s the simplest way to prevent you from reaching your potential. After all, whatever commands our attention controls our time and, in many ways, shapes our hearts. James Williams, an Oxford researcher whose work covers the ethics of attention and technology, explains this further:

“In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to ‘want what we want to want.’”

I had personally been in a season where I was craving community, quality time with my kids, and joy in my marriage, but I spent most of my day doing things that left hardly any time for people. My family bore the brunt of my never-ending to-do list, but I’d been on the receiving end from other moms too, becoming much more sensitive to canceled meet-ups and unanswered texts. You see, in the end, it’s our relationships that get sacrificed on the altar of productivity. This is not to say the work we do as moms is insignificant, but there comes a point in our parenting journey where we need to be more realistic about the things that don’t need our time. Hard work—no matter how well-intended—is not always virtuous, especially if those tasks are completed at the expense of our relationships with others. This too is a tale as old as time. Just ask Mary and Martha.

Being productive feels good; it provides a sense of purpose, and the work surrounding motherhood amplifies this. But maintaining a healthy workload—one that nourishes rather than depletes—starts with drawing clear boundaries that protect our time, attention, and relationships. The pigeon learned this too, eventually finding his way home—but not before he discovered the difference between what he should do and what he must do, creating space for friendship in between.