Spread yourself too thin

Young asian woman sleeping on her study materials.
(Photo: Irina L /Pixabay | Text: David/ArtisanEnglish.jp)

YouTube / iTunes / Spotify / Radio Public / Pocket Casts / Google Podcasts / Breaker / Overcast

Listen to ArtisanEnglish.jp posts & lesson intros here.



Idiom: Spread yourself too thin

Have you ever felt like Bilbo Baggins from The Lord of the Rings?

You know, like ‘butter scraped over too much bread.’

If you don’t know, then you can check out the movie clip here.

Go ahead, check it out, and I’ll still be here when you get back.

I’m not sure if it’s a modern phenomenon or not, but many of us feel we are spreading ourselves too thin.


It means that we are trying to do too many things at one time.


Our attention is continually being pulled in many directions simultaneously.

Perhaps a lot of it is our fault because we are unable to say no or fail to better schedule and organize our time.

One thing I regularly read about is how to make time for yourself when you feel you are spreading yourself too thin.

I mentioned earlier about not knowing if it’s a new phenomenon or not.

I’m sure one, two or three hundred years ago, people felt spread too thin on occasion.

I like to think about how lucky we are.

We don’t have to hunt for food, plow the fields, or make handmade butter.

Life should be much easier nowadays.

The introduction of new technologies was supposed to give us more free time, not less.

We need to teach ourselves how to take a step back.

Whether a person is a student, office worker, medical doctor or homemaker, we all feel we are spreading ourselves too thin from time to time.

Perhaps the reason why there is not enough butter is that we are trying to eat too much bread.


Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test

This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).

On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 79.

The higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100, the easier the passage is to read.


Posted

in

by