You’ve finally reached Inbox Zero. Your calendar is wall-to-wall. You feel like a master of efficiency. Congratulations, you’ve just built a shrine to busyness. Too bad it doesn’t mean you’ve built anything else.
We live in a symphony of pings and dings, a constant hum of motion that makes us feel vital, engaged, and, most importantly, busy. The problem is, you’re not a maestro. You’re a tire spinning in the mud.
We’ve all worn busyness as a badge of honor. But busyness isn’t a strategy. It’s a symptom of a deeper malaise, a modern religion complete with its own rituals and sacred texts. It’s comforting, it’s familiar, and it’s utterly useless.
And we don’t do it because it works. We do it because it feels safe.
The Science Behind Our Rituals
Three studies (amongst others) explain why leaders keep genuflecting at the altar of busyness.
The Unbearable Discomfort of Doing Nothing
A 2010 study by Christopher Hsee at the University of Chicago found that when given a choice between waiting idly or doing a simple, pointless task, most people chose the pointless task. Stillness felt worse than waste. That’s why executives would rather add another meeting than sit in silence with the terrifying question: what should we stop doing?
The Effort-Equals-Value Delusion
Justin Kruger’s research shows that we consistently rate things that seem to require more effort as higher quality, even when they’re not. The art that took longer must be better. The leader working 80 hours must be smarter. In reality, we’re just mistaking exhaustion for excellence.
The Slot Machine in Your Pocket
Gloria Mark’s research at UC Irvine shows workers check email every six minutes. We don’t do this because it’s efficient. We do it because it’s ritualized… inbox refresh as dopamine lever. A modern chant in the cult of busyness. Addictive, meaningless, but impossible to resist.
The Sacred Texts of Busyness
Your calendar, inbox, and to-do lists are the sacred texts of the cult. They aren’t evil. Used well, they’re powerful tools. But in the cult of busyness, they stop being instruments of focus and become rituals of avoidance. They are monuments to lack of boundaries and proof of endless reactivity.
It’s not the tools that fail us, but the way we use them to hide from consequence.
The Calendar Altar
Your calendar is a diary of your delusions. A full calendar, crammed with back-to-back meetings, is not a sign of importance. It’s a security blanket, a meticulously organized chaos that makes you feel in control while you’re simply being controlled.
A full calendar is devotion to motion. The pilgrimage from one room to the next. Meetings where decisions die, ideas circle endlessly, and consensus is mistaken for progress. At day’s end, you’ve coordinated plenty and created nothing. Your calendar doesn’t show what you’ve achieved. It shows what you’ve avoided.
The Inbox Scripture
We’ve all felt that little jolt when we reply within seconds. But your inbox is just a to-do list written by strangers. Every time you check it, you’re not moving forward but reacting.
We treat inboxes like slot machines, pulling the lever for a hit of dopamine. The faster we respond, the more we train others that our attention is on tap. Congratulations, you’re running a help desk. Your inbox proves nothing except how easily you can be summoned.
The To-Do List Rosary
Your to-do list isn’t a roadmap. It’s a comforting, low-stakes rosary of activities you tick through like prayers.
The small tasks feel safe. They give the illusion of progress without risk. We clutch our rosaries, muttering chants, while the real work sits untouched. Micro-victories pile up, but nothing moves forward. It’s leadership cosplay: you look the part, you’re always in costume, but no one remembers what you actually did.
Cowardice Dressed as Ambition
Busyness camouflages fear. Leaders scatter attention across dozens of tasks because focus is dangerous. Focus risks visible failure.
So we armor ourselves. Some with marathon meetings. Others with inbox mastery. Motion becomes a suit of armor made of emails and status updates… heavy, impressive, but useless in a real fight.
Progress leaves bruises. It means risking something that might not work. When you put your energy into a single consequential task and it fails, everyone sees the bruise. That’s why the cult of busyness thrives: it rewards cover, not courage. Better to look busy than to risk being bold.
The result is a landscape littered with frantic activity and a stunning absence of meaningful outcomes.
A Reckoning with Reality
The only way out of the cult is to get comfortable with getting bruised. You can’t protect your time and avoid discomfort.
Here are two practical actions to take:
1. The Empty Calendar Test: Your calendar is a canvas, not a catch-all. Start blank. For each meeting, ask: What’s the purpose? What’s the outcome? Why should I be there? If you can’t answer, don’t add it. Then share your calendar with your team and ask them which meeting they see as valuable and which they perceive as a waste of time. Update based on their feedback.
2. The 2-for-1 Rule: For every new task, delete, delegate, or complete two others. This is the simplest and most effective way to manage the pile of tasks waiting for you. Make it even more meaningful by picking the single action that will bruise tomorrow if left undone and do it first.
Busyness can be an empty ritual if it is all motion and no meaning. Good leadership is the practice of consequence: active choices, actions, and outcomes that leave a mark. Busyness keeps you hidden in a blur of activity. Leadership leaves a bruise… a proof you did something that mattered.