Rewrite this text to be shorter and clearer, without losing information:

I used to believe that being busy was the same thing as making progress, and I treated the constant presence of activity as evidence that I was moving forward. In my mind, simply having many things to do meant that something meaningful was being accomplished. The more occupied I was, the easier it became to assume that my efforts were leading somewhere and that progress was being made. For a long time, I did not separate the condition of being busy from the actual experience of making progress, because I thought they were essentially one and the same.

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