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Last week, I asked a good friend what they had accomplished that day. She launched into a fifteen-minute monologue about attending three meetings, responding to forty-seven emails, updating five spreadsheets and reviewing countless documents. When she finished, I asked her again: “But what did you accomplish?” The silence that followed was deafening. She’d confused being busy with being productive, motion with movement, activity with achievement. She’s not alone. We’re living through the great busyness delusion — a collective hallucination where everyone thinks they’re incredibly busy, but most people are just incredibly scattered. We’ve created a culture where being busy has become a badge of honor, like wearing exhaustion as a designer accessory. I see it everywhere: executives bragging about their packed calendars like they’re trophies, employees competing over who stayed latest at the office, entrepreneurs wearing stress like a superhero cape. We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that busy equals important, that frantic means successful, that chaos is proof of relevance. The Theater of Productivity The modern workplace has become a grand theater of productivity, complete with elaborate performances and impressive stage props. We’ve got color-coded calendars, productivity apps that track our productivity apps and AI tools sorting things left and right for us. We look incredibly busy — and that’s exactly the problem. I learned this lesson watching my own behavior many years ago. I used to pride myself on responding to emails within minutes, attending every meeting I was invited to and keeping my calendar packed tighter than a Tokyo subway car. One day, I asked myself one simple question: “What are the three most important things I need to get done each day in priority order?” From that moment on, I changed my calendar scheduling, where I spent my time and what I did not focus on. This is when I realized the difference between being busy and being productive. Busy is sitting in meetings as the twelfth participant. Productive is structuring your day so you don’t need to. Busy is attending every meeting. Productive is questioning which meetings need to exist. Busy is multitasking. Productive is intentional tasking. Editor’s picks The Unnecessary Email Flow Let’s talk about the elephant on everyone’s laptop: email. The average executive spends 24% of their time managing email. That sounds busy, right? But what are we accomplishing with all that electronic shuffling? Most email is digital small talk — the professional equivalent of asking about the weather. “Thanks for your email.” “Please see attached.” “Let’s circle back on this.” “Hope this finds you well.” We’ve created an entire economy of electronic politeness that generates activity without producing value. If you change your approach to focus on the highest priority “things” and remove yourself from less important (not “not important”) tasks, you will naturally slim your inbox and focus on projects, goals and activities that matter. And let’s remember, email doesn’t pay the bills, it’s a tool and doesn’t replace project and goal execution. The Rolling Stone Culture Council is an invitation-only community for Influencers, Innovators and Creatives. Do I qualify? Meeting Mania Then there are meetings — the black holes of the business universe where time goes to die. The average executive spends 23 hours per week in meetings. Seems like a lot. Related Content We’ve created a meeting culture that confuses attendance with contribution, presence with productivity. I’ve sat through countless meetings where the primary accomplishment was scheduling another meeting. It’s like Russian nesting dolls, but instead of dolls, it’s meetings about meetings about meetings. My favorite example comes from a teammate who complained about being “too busy” to focus on strategic planning. When we audited his calendar, we found he was spending 18 hours per week in meetings that were either purely informational, exploratory or duplicative. He wasn’t busy with important work; he was busy avoiding important work by hiding in conference rooms. The Multitasking Myth Perhaps the greatest contributor to the busyness delusion is our belief in multitasking. We’ve convinced ourselves that doing multiple things simultaneously makes us more productive. In reality, what we call multitasking is just rapid task-switching, and it makes us less effective at everything. Studies show that multitasking can reduce productivity by up to 40%. But it makes us feel busy, so we keep doing it. We’re on conference calls while answering emails while reviewing documents while thinking about lunch. We’re not accomplishing more; we’re accomplishing less with more stress and confusion. The Urgency Trap The busyness delusion thrives on urgency addiction — the belief that everything is important and everything is urgent. We’ve lost the ability to distinguish between what’s urgent and what’s important, so we treat everything as both. This creates a constant state of reactive crisis management that feels incredibly busy but rarely moves us toward our actual goals. Real productivity isn’t about doing more things; it’s about doing the right things well. It’s not about speed; it’s about direction. It’s not about being busy; it’s about being effective. The most productive people I know often appear to have more free time than everyone else — not because they work less, but because they work smarter. Breaking the Busyness Cycle So how do we escape the busyness trap? Start by asking different questions. Instead of, “How busy was your day?” ask, “What did you accomplish?” Instead of, “How many meetings did you have?” ask, “What decisions did you make?” Instead of, “How many emails did you process?” ask, “What problems did you solve?” Try the three-priority rule: every day, identify the three most important things you need to accomplish. Everything else is secondary. If you can’t complete those three things because you’re too busy with other activities, you’re not busy — you’re distracted. Trending Stories Audit your activities ruthlessly. That weekly status meeting that never changes anything? Cancel it. Those email chains that go nowhere? Stop responding. That project that everyone talks about but nobody advances? Either commit to it properly or kill it entirely. The goal isn’t to be less busy — it’s to be busy with things that matter.
