The Pernicious Busyness Trap
by Joseph Thompson
I can’t think of a more important skill for leaders right now than reclaiming the space to think clearly in the midst of all the noise.
- Dorie Clark, author and executive educator, 2026
Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
U.S. Navy SEALS mantra
It is an all-too-common refrain from management teams: We’re too busy.
“We’re too busy to plan for the future.” “We’re too busy to prioritize.” “We’re too busy to document swimlanes and decision rights.” “We’re too busy to clean our data.” “We’re too busy to redesign our workflows.” “We’re too busy to revisit our assumptions.”
All different stanzas of the same poem: We’re too busy to think.
“We’re too busy pushing the car to stop and put gas in the fuel tank.”
The theme is so common that whole books have been written on the subject and there are even memes devoted to busyness on the internet.
And yet, despite the vast amount of discussion, documentation, and even humor, too many organizations, teams, managers, and individuals continue to fall into the busyness trap.
[Note there is a difference between being busy in a healthy/productive sense adding organizational value and excessive, even theatrical, busyness. In the former case, your efforts are focused on high-impact actions which advance you toward your goals and keep you off the shoals. In the latter case, which is the focus on this article, you are filling your time with low-value tasks that create a lot of churn but little real progress.]
The Siren Song of Busyness
In the epic The Odyssey, among the challenges which the protagonist encounters are the mythical Sirens. That memorable scene has given rise to the expression, “a siren song” – a seemingly enticing distraction that hides negative, destructive consequences.
Busyness is a siren song, an especially pernicious one, since so many of the dangers and risks from busyness are not immediately obvious. These dangers lurk beneath the surface of an organization where they fester, metastasize, and do enormous damage which is usually hidden from cursory views.
Perhaps the most insidious effect of busyness is how it distorts our perception of progress.
The hidden risks of the busyness trap include:
Superficial exchanges: When teams find themselves in the busyness trap, speed of communication is often prized and seen as more valuable than the quality or depth of discussions. As a result, only limited information is shared; context, concerns, and clarity are often omitted in the interest of brevity, speed, and shallowness. Compounding the challenge, leaders may limit exchanges to quick pleasantries, avoiding the depth of discourse needed to establish and maintain social connectedness, needed to have difficult conversations, or needed for anything other than transactional, superficial relationships.
Dilution of discussion: When teams have cloaked themselves in the busyness mantle, they tend to ask simpler questions because they are looking for faster answers. Yet simpler questions lead to watered-down discussion which are not likely to surface looming risks, reveal key barriers, illuminate crucial interdependencies, develop critical insights, or consider diverse stakeholder perspectives. Moreover, teams which are stuck grounded in the realm of simpler questions are not apt to recognize when exigent circumstances have changed the critical assumptions on which key decisions were originally based.
Oversimplification of problems: It is not just the questions that get simpler; it is also the solutions. When leaders feel “too busy,” they tend to overly simply complex issues because they only have time for faster, simpler solutions. Unfortunately, very few important issues are so straightforward and clearcut that they can be effectively resolved with simple solutions. When teams overly simplify complex problems, the full scope of the challenges, the multi-layered impacts of those challenges on the organizational health and ecosystem, and the depth of truly creative solutions needed to resolve those issues are all apt to go unrecognized. Problems go unsolved and, worse, teams may have cosmetically masked them.
Cognitive Debt and Workslop: Teams mired in busyness are often tempted to turn to (supposedly) time-saving tools such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) in lieu of taking the time to think through challenging issues on their own first. A growing body of research has shown that how a person uses AI, and when, in the cognitive process matters a great deal. MIT researchers, for example, have shown that heavy AI users often struggle to recall their own work (so called “cognitive debt”). Researchers at Harvard Business School’s AI Institute have found that those who use AI frequently often let their guard down and accept AI answers without questioning them, resulting in workslop. More troubling, researchers are finding that those who turn to AI first, before taking the time to independently think through the issues first, can actually lose their expertise neurologically, without even realizing it.
Social Offloading: When managers feel too busy, it can be tempting for them to want to use AI to handle difficult conversations with employees, use AI for performance reviews, or otherwise use AI as a substitute for direct employee development discussions. But this type of social offloading from managers has been shown to be extremely detrimental to employees and teams. Research from BetterUp and Oxford University has found that when managers use AI for social offloading, team coordination falls, burnout rises markedly, and attrition risk increases sharply. What’s more, studies have shown that delegating employee development interactions to AI does even longer-term damage in terms of reducing the capacity of managers to engage empathetically; it actually increases cognitive load over the longer term.
Trust Toxicity: When people have convinced themselves that they are too busy to take the time to dig beneath the surface and to explore issues, they often create internal “stories” they tell themselves in order to explain the actions of others. They may dismissively tell themselves that a peer or subordinate is behaving a certain way “because that person is just being _____ [fill in the blank]”. Sadly, the words people tend to use to fill in for these stories are usually negative, dismissive, defensive, and often ascribe ulterior motivations and intentions, not observable facts. Too-busy people tend to fill in words that label others as being obstinate, lazy, manipulative, resistant, uncooperative, mean-spirited, petulant, sabotaging, etc. Applying such labels without striving to understand the actual issues can be toxic to trust and to the very relationships leaders (and others) need to nurture.
Compounding Doom Loops: Psychologically, as human beings, we have an “additive bias” which makes it mentally “cheaper” and easier for us to think of things to add to our to-do lists or schedules than to think of things to subtract from them. Trying to remove things from our schedules requires making the time to take stock of all the items competing for our attention, assessing their relative importance and value, and then taking an active action to remove them – all of which takes more time and more mental effort. As a result, the busyness trap is an entanglement snare: the busier one becomes, the more deeply one is apt to be pulled into the trap.
Inability to Collaborate: Busyness rewards artificial harmony, convergence, and the push for rapid consensus; but these behaviors are antithetical to collaboration. True collaboration (as opposed to simple teamwork or coordination) requires taking the time to gather, actively listen to each other, and synthesize multiple (often disparate) viewpoints. Collaboration requires taking time to engaging in vigorous debate – debate whose intent is not to ‘best’ someone else or prove why one person’s idea is better than another’s; it requires taking the time not to coalesce on the right solution, but to co-labor in pursuit of the best solution.
Tyranny of the Urgent: When mired in the busyness swamp, organizational priorities and investments are often based on what seems urgent, right now, vice what is actually important or what will soon be important. And something even more insidious happens, too. As noted by AI consultant Amjad (Chohan) Ali, “When urgency goes unchallenged, it quietly replaces strategy.” Whatever strategy was crafted and agreed upon languishes as leaders react to fires vice preventing them.
“In India we call this ‘painting the bullock cart wheels.’ Just when the harvest is ready to be brought in, the farmer notices that the wheels of his bullock cart are looking rather shabby. Instead of going out into the fields, he takes a day to go into town for paint and then spends a week painting beautiful designs on the cart and wheels. When he finally gets around to harvesting the rice, he has to work twelve hours a day just to keep up.”
Eknath Easwaran
Missed Opportunities: One of the first things that “we’re too-busy” teams tend to jettison in an effort to find more time is practicing strategic foresight. Without consistently carving out the time to ‘look ahead’ and to evaluate emerging trends and opportunities, organizations often miss key fork-in-the-road moments. Ironically, failing to look ahead in the interest of trying to save time can result in losing more time than was saved when organizations have to backtrack, pivot, or radically alter course, often at great cost and with great disruption.
Treatment of Symptoms: Teams that are stuck in the busyness trap often only see, and only react to, symptoms of problems; they may not invest in taking the time to identify the actual illnesses which are causing the symptoms to present. Frenetic “we’re too busy to look deeper” activity stops teams from finding and addressing root causes, so issues remain and grow. What’s more, sometimes the treatment of symptoms can actually aggravate the underlying issues, inadvertently throwing fuel on the very fires the organization is trying to extinguish.
Of course, alongside these hidden dangers, there are more obvious risks, too. The more “above the surface” risks of excessive busyness include cognitive overload, increased workplace stress, burnout, reduced engagement, irritability, indifference, cynicism, and in some cases, depression.
Clearly, falling into the busyness trap is bad for business.
But that brings us to a question. If it is well understood that excessive busyness is a problem for business, then why do so many leadership teams sink into the busyness trap?
There is no one answer – and, indeed, in many cases there may be many, overlapping answers.
Common Causes of the Busyness Trap
Let’s look at just a few of the possible answers to the question of why leaders, managers, and teams fall into the busyness trap. While these potential causes are presented discretely, that is seldom how they are encountered in organizations. In most cases, there are multiple, simultaneous, overlapping and reinforcing forces at work which contribute to the seductive power of the sirens’ call.
Psychological Rewards
Challenge Avoidance. In some cases, busyness is used as an alibi, an excuse to avoid prioritizing, making decisions, or tackling more challenging work. Author Mark Manson summed it up this way: “Constantly ‘being busy’ is just procrastination in a business suit.”
Status Symbolism. In some organizations, being constantly busy is seen as something of a status symbol or badge of honor. In corporate cultures where busyness is conflated with commitment or performance (what has been dubbed as performance theater), busyness is seen as a proxy for importance. Similarly, in other cases, people wear the busyness badge as a way they can signal how valuable and indispensable they must be to the organization.
False of Control. In some cases, busyness may be a way for leaders to maintain a false sense of control by allowing them to complete many easy tasks, with each completion being accompanied by a brief burst of dopamine, making them feel they are adding value, getting things done, and creating the illusion of progress and control.
Avoiding Discomfort. Some managers may be uncomfortable with taking the time to engage in strategic matters that require stillness, such as deep, reflective thinking. Activities like strategic thinking may make leaders feel uncomfortable because it requires using different parts of the brain, different neural processes, and frequently requires working with ambiguity and uncertainty. Some may feel guilty that they aren’t doing “real work” or worry that others won’t perceived them as working if they are engaged in silent thought, foresight, or reflection. Busyness allows people to avoid such discomfort.
Echo Chambers
Heroic Leadership. In some organizations, leaders are rewarded with praise, attention, and other forms of recognition for jumping in (often at the last minute) to save projects, to meet deadlines, and otherwise solve crises. Sometimes merely the act of jumping in (often with great fanfare and vigor) is rewarded even though the individual’s actions may have accomplished very little or may even have been disruptive. This can quickly create a cultural echo chamber where it is seen as more heroic to put out a fire than prevent it.
Mirroring Leadership. Sometimes, busyness is signaled from the top. If more senior managers and bosses are seen as constantly busy, working extreme hours, and “always on,” it creates the temptation (as well as strong explicit or implicit pressure) for subordinates to mirror this pattern of busyness in order to convey that they are team players, that they have the traits needed for success and promotion.
Cultural Reinforcement. In many cases, there can be organizational or industry echo chambers at play. When teams use alibis such as “this [busyness] is just part of the [insert industry] culture!” or “this is just the culture here,” they are proffering excuses akin to “this is how we’ve always done it.” Often, teams point to supposed organizational and/or industry ‘norms’ as a way to deflect responsibility away from their own behavior.
What’s Measured is What Matters.Organizations oftentimes inadvertently incentivize busyness by collecting, analyzing, and posting productivity metrics or KPIs that focus on activities (meetings attended, emails/IMs sent, hours spent, etc.) not on outcomes. This can create real or perceived pressure to stay focused on what is easily measured right now, rather than focus on what really matters.
Systemic Flaws
Poor Prioritization Frameworks. When organizations create dozens of priorities, fail to prioritize their priorities, or – worse – don’t actually create priorities, it is difficult for managers and employees to know where to invest their limited time and attention resources. A related, more noxious, situation occurs when organizations create “on-paper” priorities but those priorities do not actually drive resource allocations or to make cost decisions. In such cases, managers and teams are apt to eschew the ‘official’ priorities and follow the priorities they perceive are resourced, discussed, or measured instead.
Misaligned Incentives. Organizations sometimes say they value things antithetical to busyness like strategic forethought, mentorship, and innovation, but then tie compensation, promotions, and performance ratings to activities or to behaviors that foster busyness. For example, if a manager has 20 direct reports (which should take a considerable investment of effort to effectively coach and mentor) but the manager is evaluated and rewarded solely on short-term financial measures, the manager is not likely to make the time needed to care for, or be accessible to, their direct reports.
Metric Escalation Loop. Goodhart’s Law states that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Many organizations build performance metrics (measures) as performance targets. This creates a ‘metric escalation loop’ in which teams learn to optimize for the metric rather than for the objectives for which the metric is a proxy. In addition, teams will often create a cascading series of internal/departmental/team dashboards designed to give managers more granular, more local KPIs intended to help them boost the main metric. But all of those local reports, spreadsheets, dashboards, etc., require considerable time and effort to build, populate, update, report, review, etc. That added overhead exacerbates busyness without actually driving the intended outcomes.
Meeting Governance Flaws. In some organizations, there is no clear framework on how to schedule, manage, or invite attendees to meetings, or even clarify why teams should have meetings in the first place. Without defined meeting governance (for example, rubrics such as no meetings can be scheduled on Fridays, meetings can only be scheduled for 20 minutes or 50 minutes, every meeting must include an agenda with time durations, only individuals expected to introduce information essential to a decision should be invited, etc.), it is easy for calendars to become oversaturated with meetings which are unnecessary, undisciplined, and/or unproductive.
Escaping the Busyness Trap
Unfortunately, there is no single, “easy button” solution for avoiding the busyness trap.
As noted above, there are many possible reasons teams fall into the busyness trap and in most organizations, there are usually multiple causes operating in concert. And many of these causes may be systemic, thus difficult for an individual to address on their own.
Moreover, as discussed earlier, once ensnared in the busyness trap it is easy to be pulled deeper and deeper into busyness.
Because of this, escaping the busyness trap can be complicated.
Fortunately, there are a host of resources online and in print which can help individuals and teams. This is also an area in which AI can quickly generate a raft of potential fixes†.
Examples of potential solutions include:
Governance practices could include establishing formal reviews to kill “zombie projects” which are no longer yielding high strategic value; Kill-to-Invest rules (which require resources for new initiatives to come from legacy initiatives; and Kill-Switch rules (“one in, one [or two] out”) wherein for each new initiative or priority project approved, one (or two) current ones have to be terminated. [The widespread use of the word “kill” in these approaches speaks to just how dangerous the busyness monster is perceived to be.]
Operational practices could include capping organizational leadership commitments to a maximum of 75-80% of the workweek with the remaining capacity expected to be devoted to strategic reflection and innovation; creating, monitoring, and adhering to human capital budgets (i.e., hours per resource) when approving initiatives; and restricting meetings to predictable but unmovable common blocks of time on the entire team’s calendars.
Personal practices could include investing in an executive coach to help a leader elevate their focus; blocking “unavailable” periods on work calendars to devote to completing important but not urgent work; and changing default meeting calendar settings to limit meetings to 20-25 minutes or 45-50 minutes (vice 30 and 60 minutes, respectively).
Conclusion
Teams (or individuals) which articulate some variation of the theme, “we’re too busy to think” have fallen for the siren song of busyness.
Far from being seen as a badge of honor or as a symbol of importance, being too busy should be seen for what it really is: a pernicious trap that not only damages organizations but often creates a vicious cycle in which busyness begets more busyness.
Recognizing the busyness trap for what it is as well as appreciating the very real organizational, team, and personal costs it brings is a critical first step toward escaping the trap.
This might be a good time to think about whether you and/or your teams have fallen into the busyness trap. If you think you have, you should consider how that busyness may be impacting your organization and what you can do to resist its siren song.
That is, unless you’re too busy.
†One caveat must be offered: As noted, there are many different potential causes of busyness and many of the ‘fixes’ and remedies proffered by AI, authors, speakers, and other sources may not be appropriate for your specific situation. It is important to treat the root causes, not the symptoms. In addition, just as consumer drug commercials consistently point out, “you should not take [this medication] if you are allergic to it,” individuals and teams should not apply a busyness treatment which will trigger an allergic organizational reaction.
At SZH Consulting, we believe meaningful progress is not always about doing more. Sometimes, it begins with creating enough space to step back, question what has become normal, and ask whether the way we are working is actually moving us forward. Because the real question may not be, “How can we fit more into our day?” but rather, “What deserves our time, attention, and energy in the first place?”
