The Busyness Trap – Why We Wear Exhaustion as a Status Symbol
The Busyness Trap – Why We Wear Exhaustion as a Status Symbol
Issue 250, February 5, 2026
Ask any professional how they are doing, and you are likely to hear some variation of “busy” or “slammed” or “crazy right now.” We have turned exhaustion into a status marker, using packed schedules as evidence that we matter and that what we do matters.
Research published in the Journal of Consumer Research by Bellezza, Paharia, and Keinan in 2017 documented this phenomenon empirically. Their studies found that people perceived individuals who worked long hours and had little leisure time as more important, ambitious, and admired than those with more balanced lives. Constant activity, they concluded, signals desired human capital characteristics like competence and ambition while also indicating scarcity and demand in the job market. The busier you appear, the more valuable you seem, and how you individually feel.
Notably, the researchers found that this effect is culturally specific, so where you reside and work in the world matters. In Italy, where leisure still represents high status in the tradition of what economist Thorstein Veblen called the “leisure class” (the idea that the wealthy once demonstrated status through conspicuous non-work), the pattern is reversed. But in American professional culture, perpetual motion has become the new status symbol amid the relentless pursuit of innovation and success that defines so much of our working lives. We have traded the appearance of having time for the appearance of not having any at all.
The Activity-Achievement Confusion
Constant motion feels like productivity for most of us, but it often substitutes for it. Attending meetings, responding to emails, reviewing collaborative notifications, participating in calls, and reviewing documents all create the sensation of work without necessarily producing outcomes that matter. At the end of an exhausting day, we can point to everything that we did without being able to identify what we actually accomplished.
This confusion between activity and achievement persists because activity is visible. Boxes are checked on the to-do list, email volume decreases, and your phone is no longer buzzing with notifications. Actual achievement, meanwhile, is often harder to quantify. We can, of course, see the hours worked, the meetings attended, and the messages sent. We cannot as easily measure the quality of thinking, the importance of decisions made, or the actual value that was created. In the absence of better measures, we default to those that are visible to us.
The professionals who seem least busy are sometimes the ones getting the most important work done. They have protected time for substantive critical thinking, for strategic conversations, and for the kind of focused attention that complex problems and related decision-making require. Their calendars look empty compared to their peers, but their impact often far exceeds those running from meeting to meeting.
Perpetual Motion as Identity
Jonathan Gershuny’s research on “busyness as the badge of honor for the new superordinate working class” traces how we arrived at this cultural moment. Using UK time diary studies spanning from 1961 to 2001, he documented a fundamental reversal: the negative relationship between social status and work time that existed through most of history has inverted. High human capital individuals now work more hours, not fewer. Work, not leisure, has become what signifies dominant social status.
For many professionals, being constantly occupied has become intertwined with who they are. The constant motion provides structure, purpose, and a clear sense of what each day requires. Slowing down feels disorienting, even threatening. What would I do with unscheduled time? What would it mean about my value if I were not constantly needed?
World Economic Forum research on “optimal busyness” suggests the drive goes deeper than mere social signaling. Employees chase an attractive, accelerated temporal experience that creates adrenaline and positive energy. The buzzing feeling itself becomes inherently addictive. When sustained too long without break, however, it transforms from energizing into overwhelming anxiety, exhaustion, and sometimes depression.
The resulting identity attachment makes this perpetual motion surprisingly difficult to release. Even when people recognize intellectually that they are over-committed, even when they can see that their packed calendars are preventing more important work, the pattern persists. The thought of having open time, even on a personal level, triggers anxiety rather than relief.
The Cost of Constant Motion
When every hour is scheduled, certain kinds of thinking become impossible. We need time to think, ponder, and consider, even for personal decisions. Strategy requires reflection that can only come via unstructured time. Attempts at innovation and finding creative solutions to problems require space for thoughts and ideas to connect in unexpected ways. Deep critical thinking, necessary for complex challenges, requires protection from the constant interruptions that seem to fill our days. These thinking, creative, and innovative capabilities atrophy when calendars are always full, consuming nearly every bit of our cognitive capacity along with whatever energy we have.
Studies on occupational burnout confirm that chronic stress and lack of recovery make us less effective, not more. We explored this and related themes when considering executive burnout last year. Overwork correlates with lower productivity, reduced creativity, strained relationships, and long-term health risks. As a society, we know research has produced these insights time and again, yet we continue the pattern as if somehow we are exempt from its findings. We are different from everyone else. We enjoy the hustle and cannot see ourselves being anything but busy.
The contrast with how humans lived for most of history is striking. Research on contemporary hunter-gatherer societies found that they worked about four to five hours daily, with ample leisure time for games, ceremonies, music, and social activities. This matters not because we should return to pre-industrial patterns, but because it reveals that the constant activity we treat as foundational for success is historically novel, without precedent in how human societies have organized work for most of our species’ existence. We have constructed this reality; we can reconstruct it.
We do not often acknowledge it, but physical and mental health erode under sustained constant activity. Sleep is routinely sacrificed, with accolades given to those who can survive on the least amount of rest. Exercise gets skipped despite stated goals. Stress accumulates and builds without release. Despite what we feel and experience, we somehow believe that the demands and consequences justify the cost. But the demands placed on us or those we place on ourselves rarely actually require what we are sacrificing. We have just told ourselves they do.
The Organizational Dimension
Individual choices alone do not explain the perpetual motion epidemic. Organizations actively perpetuate it through meeting-heavy cultures, always-on communication expectations, and reward systems that recognize visible activity over substantive outcomes. When leaders model constant motion, they signal to everyone else that this is what commitment looks like. When promotion decisions favor those who appear most busy, the message reinforces itself throughout the hierarchy.
The organizational costs extend beyond individual well-being. When everyone is too busy to think strategically, organizations drift without realizing it. Innovation stalls because no one has time for the unfocused exploration that generates new ideas. Institutional knowledge fails to transfer because experienced professionals are too busy to mentor. And perhaps most critically, transformation initiatives fail because leaders lack the cognitive capacity to navigate complexity while running from meeting to meeting. The 70% transformation failure rate we often cite has roots in this phenomenon: organizations attempting change while their leaders are too busy to lead it thoughtfully.
Of course, some demands are genuinely non-negotiable. Deadlines exist, clients have expectations, and certain seasons bring unavoidable intensity. But most professionals, when honest with themselves, recognize that significant portions of their packed schedules are self-imposed or passively accepted rather than truly required. The meeting that could have been an email, the status update no one reads, the call that recaps what everyone already knows. These accumulate until they crowd out what actually matters.
Shifting from Hours to Impact
Breaking out of this trap requires measuring differently, really measuring what matters. Instead of asking how full your calendar is, ask what you actually accomplished this week that mattered. Instead of counting hours worked, count decisions made, problems solved, or people developed. The shift from input metrics to outcome metrics quickly reveals whether activity is producing actual tangible achievement. This same principle applies to organizational transformation: companies that measure success by initiatives launched rather than capabilities changed fall into the same trap. The appearance of progress substitutes for actual progress.
Courage to be less busy than your peers is also needed. In cultures such as the United States, where constant activity signals status, deliberately maintaining open time can feel like admitting inadequacy. It can feel like slacking, meaning less to yourself or others, or putting a professional career in jeopardy. But the professionals who make this choice often find that their influence increases rather than decreases. They are available when it matters, bringing focused attention and thoughtful solutions to important conversations. They think clearly because they have protected capacity for thought.
I observed this pattern recently with a senior executive who made a deliberate choice to protect two hours each morning for strategic thinking. No meetings, no email, no calls. Her peers initially questioned whether she was as committed as they were. Within six months, she had become the person everyone sought for the most complex problems because she was the only one with the capacity to actually think about them. Her calendar looked less impressive; her impact was undeniable.
Consider auditing how you spend time for a day or even a week. Categorize activities by actual importance, not by urgency or by who requested them. Most professionals who do this honestly discover that a significant percentage of their activity produces minimal value. That discovery creates the opening for different choices. Beyond the audit, consider specific practices: time blocking for strategic work that you protect as non-negotiable, declining meetings without clear agendas or decision points, and setting communication boundaries such as designated email response windows rather than constant monitoring.
A Different Status Symbol
What if the answer to “How are you?” shifted from “So busy” to something else entirely?
Imagine a professional responding that they are focused on a few things that really matter, or that they have protected time for thinking this week, or that they are being intentional about where they spend attention. These answers sound strange because they are uncommon, but they represent a different relationship with work that many of us would prefer if we felt permission to claim it.
The most effective professionals we have observed have developed an immunity to the perpetual motion competition. They do not apologize for open calendars. They do not perform exhaustion to signal importance. They focus on what matters, they measure what matters, they protect time for what requires deep attention, and they trust that their contribution speaks for itself.
The immunity is learnable but requires examining why constant activity has become so attached to one’s identity. It requires tolerance for the discomfort of unscheduled time. It requires the recognition and confidence that value comes from impact, not activity. And it requires willingness and courage to be different from one’s peers who remain trapped in the competition.
Your calendar reflects your priorities, whether you have chosen those priorities consciously or let them be chosen for you. A calendar that is always full leaves no room for what matters most. The trap is real, but escaping it is possible for anyone willing to measure success differently than hours consumed.
Connect with Us
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