"Boy, am I productive!"
Both of these words seem to be used interchangeably, but truly mean something completely different. Let me give you an example: you want to clean out the garage before winter. Okay, seems reasonable. You have a general timeframe, and you know what the task looks like. To prepare for it, you want to line up a dumpster and have a plan for disposal of the larger items (i.e. city dump, etc.). Busy in this sense may be knowing who to call for the dumpster. Productive is actually making the call. Now that the dumpster is there, you go out on a Saturday morning and start cleaning it out. Productive. If you let the dumpster sit in your driveway for weeks on end without filling it up but are planning on doing it soon, that would be the busy department.
Get the picture?
Let's take the creative types out there. Because this is something I'm familiar with, let's take writers. Writers are, by and large, finicky. We let the little things bother us or bog us down so that our creative juices don't flow like we want. We wait for just the right moment, just the right amount of creative fairy dust to land on our brains and fingers, and in just the right place before we even begin to write.
If you, as a writer, read all kinds of books on writing but never put pen to page, or type any words onto either a virtual or physical page, you are just acting busy. Not productive. You need to get words down. Any amount will do. And then . . . finish.
Set a goal.
Do it consistently.
Produce something.
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