The illusion of being busy

Society tricks us into thinking hyper-productivity is success, but it’s an absolute waste of living

I am someone people know as a ‘busy person’. At least that’s the impression I get from the number of times people preface their texts, emails and IRL conversations with “I know you’re such a busy person but…” Now that I’m in mid-life, I’m aware that I can sometimes make people nervous - not because I’m an ogre, more because I no longer gabble to fill silences, and I carry myself with an air of supreme confidence even if I don’t know what I’m talking about. (That’s a whole other post).

Perhaps people preface their asks with a reference to my busy-ness in order to soften a blow to the ego if the answer is no. But my internal monologue when someone says this is almost always a defensive: “I’m not a busy person!”

In part, it’s because I no longer view being busy as shorthand for successful, useful or valuable. When I know someone defines themselves as a busy person, quite honestly, I find it tedious. It may sound harsh, but I’ve worked in enough corporates to know being busy can be performative based on how many hours are spent in meetings that could’ve been emails.

I also know – as a reformed people pleaser – that it’s easy to fill up a calendar with social engagements you don’t want to go to, but feel obliged to say yes and then feel resentful about. And conversely, I know people with busy and successful careers, some who also juggle parenting, or look after elderly parents and they manage to not make it their entire personality.

Sometimes being busy is relevant in conversation, for instance right now I have my second fiction book deadline, and I decided it would be a brilliant idea to also launch my Substack in the same week, as well as interviewing Miriam Margolyes on the weekend about her new book. So yes, I’m busy. But I’m not a busy person. And I know the difference, because I used to be.

Back when I worked for corporates, I used to be the person who opened every conversation with how busy I was, how difficult it was to take annual leave, and my social calendar used to be something that made me want to throw up. I don’t know if it’s specifically an urban thing (I’m based in London) but it was like Haruki Murakami’s ‘monkeys of the shitty island’, a propagating sickness of being busy, that we all forced upon each other.

I remember the dark days of asking friends when they were free to meet up and the response was ‘Um, I think I have a weekend free in three months’. That would get booked in, and soon enough my own calendar was booked up, and I’d pass that on to other friends, until I came to the realisation that this was not normal. If I had relatives visiting from other countries and I said, ‘sorry pal, I can’t meet with you for three months’, they would either laugh or look at me with concern and ask me to get seen by a doctor.

It was no different at work. Dashing between meetings, eating lunch furtively at my desk hoping no one would come over while I was mid chomp. Wondering if I would have to do 12-hour days in order to take a week off.

Part of this comes from city mentality, another part is certainly inherited from being the child of immigrant parents, specifically my mother. Sitting still or relaxing is not in her DNA. When I go to visit, she’s either tidying up, pruning things in the garden, cooking ‘just a small simple meal of four courses’, or asking me a list of questions about future plans. I said to her: ‘You don’t know how to just be, do you?” She looked at me as if I’d just sprouted a third ear. She has grown up with the ideology that you earn your value by being busy all the time, and anything you do for yourself is self-indulgence or laziness.

What I learned, the hard way, is that it just isn’t true. When you die, no one says in your eulogy how you were such a busy person, and you don’t get a badge because you burned your life up trying to constantly prove your value. I don’t have children which I know adds an inescapable layer of labour (even if it is done with love) – however I’ve sense checked this with my sister who does – but being busy all the time doesn’t benefit anyone. Not you, and not the people who love you.

It diminishes your sense of self until one day you may wake up and wonder who you are. I certainly did after caring for my late husband Rob who struggled with chronic depression, while I worked as a senior executive. It inevitably leads to burnout and prolonged stress which makes us fatigued, impacts our sleep.

It also, in my experience, reduces our perspective. Some things may be out of our control, but a lot of our life is comprised of the choices we make. For many of us, that includes where we work, where we live, who we socialise with, and what we choose to spend our time doing. But being in a prolonged state of stress, or being locked into a death spiral of being busy, means we feel less empowered to extricate ourselves and say no.

A number of years ago, when I realised I was moving further away from myself, I pulled an emergency handbrake on my life. I changed how I work, how I organise my social calendar and, what I fill my time with. Perhaps that’s why I feel so sensitive about being labelled a busy person. But there’s no point getting defensive about it. Others have no transparency on my calendar – they can only see what I can and can’t do, and oftentimes they will assume if I am busy, it must mean I am doing other work. They don’t know I’m busy taking myself out to lunch or going for a long walk in the woods.

The other week after recording a podcast, the host said how glad she was to get me because I was so very busy. “I hope you get a moment to rest,” she said. I took a moment before replying. I told her that I was busy, but that actually, I worked my downtime into my calendar. “What looks like a busy calendar to you, is actually a balanced calendar to me.”

It doesn’t mean I always get it right. Sometimes I take far too much on, but I always try and learn from it. I course-correct constantly. I ask myself why I’m taking something on, and give myself permission to cancel. I never begin a social interaction with the sentence: “I’m so busy…” My goal is to be busy living life, not busy being busy. The difference is that one is living for yourself, the other is living for the validation of people who won’t even remember what it is you did with your time in the years to come.