Busy Work Isn't Productivity. It's Protection.
I was supposed to start writing this article on Tuesday. Instead I spent forty-five minutes reorganising my notes folder in Obsidian, my Second Brain.
I did not need to. The folder structure had worked for two years. By the time I finished, I had four colour-coded sections, a renamed file structure and a blank page.
Wednesday came and went. Now I had managed to build a whole new automation that could help my productivity, and the same blank page I had started with.
That's me. Hiding from my own work, with a productivity tool open to convince me otherwise, looking organised.
And what I did on Tuesday and Wednesday is a classic example of what I call "Busy Work." Not laziness or lack of focus. On the contrary, it was a burst of focused, visible activity that produced a feeling of progress without producing any actual progress.
Here's the part that is tough to swallow. It was not a mistake. I did it on purpose. It felt important and a job that had to be done.
What Is Busy Work Doing For You?
I want to borrow a frame of thinking from Prof. Clayton Christensen. It's called Jobs to be Done.
People don't buy products for what they are. They buy them for what those products do for them emotionally.
A milkshake is not bought because it is a milkshake. It is bought because it makes a long commute feel like it has a habitual "marker" or transition point, breaking up a long journey and separating the start of the day from the work day. This is a useful lever when solving product-centric problems.
For the sake of this article, let's apply the same lens to our own behaviour. We are not doing busy work because the task is in front of us. We are hiring busy work to do something else for us.
So what "Job" are we hiring it to do?
- The first is visible progress. A task gets ticked. The list shrinks. Your brain reads that as movement and rewards you for it.
- The second is control. Busy work has clear inputs and clear outputs. The work that matters is open-ended, ambiguous, and has a real chance of being wrong.
- The third is the one we don't talk about often. Safety. Reorganising a folder cannot embarrass you. Replying to forty-eight emails cannot get reviewed badly. Updating your LinkedIn cannot get rejected by an investor. The work that matters can do all three.
That is what 'busy work' is really hired for. Not productivity.
The Mirror We Are Avoiding
This is the part I find uncomfortable to write because it puts the blame within, not outside. Again, no point philosophising and trying to be original when past great thinker have already given us the tools and frameworks to make life easy.
I’d pick something here from the '3M framework' from Toyota to explain my take on Busy work.
Muri is a Japanese term from the Toyota framework that refers to overburden of important work that piles up faster than we can deal with it pushing machines or people beyond their natural limits. When Muri (Overburden/Pushing beyond capacity) occurs, it leads to:
- Burnout
- Breakdowns
- Defects
We humans have a tendency to deny, minimize, or ignore a problem rather than dealing with it directly. Behavioural scientists have a name for this pattern. Sirois and Pychyl (2013) call it the priority of short-term mood repair. When we are facing overwhelming, important work (Muri), it creates discomfort. We reach for the small task that gives us immediate relief, even though it disrupts the larger goal.
These small trivial tasks provide: - A sense of productivity and progress
- Completion and closure (unlike the overwhelming main task)
- Emotional relief through small wins
The activity on trivial is not the problem. The avoidance of the important is.
You might say, this is not me - i have a strong will and i know my priorities. That is what I like to say to myself too. But then I read something that made me sit up.
Four researchers studied six years of emergency department data, 233,880 patient encounters across 84 physicians. They found that when workload rose, doctors picked the easier patients first. Easier meaning less sick. The mechanism was not laziness. It was the same short-term mood repair, the small reward of completion that I got from tidying my folder. People making life-or-death decisions, with all the training in the world, still drift toward the task that lets them feel like they are getting somewhere (KC et al., 2020).
The pull is not a personal weakness. It is wiring.
I rest my case.
So, is there no hope?
Darne ka nahi dost. Sab ho jaenga. (Don't worry, friend. It will all work out.)
Once you see "Busy Work" for what it is, the context changes. You stop asking "how do I get rid of busy work?" and start asking "what am I hiding from?"
Maybe it's the proposal you said you would start this weekend. The chapter. The conversation. The pitch. The application. Whatever the thing is, you have not started it. And on the days you are honest with yourself, you know it is not really because you didn't have time. You have been busy all day.
What we usually tell ourselves is that something else was more urgent, more valuable. We all want to believe the work we did was necessary. It is hard to find a person in the corporate world who will accept that what they did today was a waste.
You might argue, we are all part of the corporate engine and have to abide by the laws of the jungle. A fair point in passing, since I can hear it coming.
Are all operational tasks just Busy Work?
A report requested by a senior, an after-office-hours email from senior management, a meeting where your attendance is considered a valuable contribution, or a task that comes to you on Friday afternoon with a Monday deadline are all work that is important and urgent.
And I agree.
Not all work that pulls you away from your priorities is busy work.
Some emails have to be sent. Meetings have to be attended.
So Where do we draw the line ?
The line is not in the task. The line is in the motive.
Each one of these tasks could be put into two buckets, real and pseudo. A real task is work. A pseudo-urgent task is one we are choosing to treat as urgent, and the choice is almost always because the alternative, the genuinely important non-urgent thing, is harder, more open-ended, and more likely to fail.
And on most days, you know which is which. Right?
So What Now?
I could wrap this up with a five-step framework from the loads of management gurus out there. There are excellent books on the subject, and some of you have probably already read them. If frameworks alone solved this, none of us would still be stuck in busy work.
What I will leave you with is a question, because the question is where the work begins. And it is not the easy version.
If the only person watching you was you, no boss reading the timestamps, no team noticing your output, no audience at all, would the work you did this week still be worth having done?
Sit with that for a minute before you answer. Most of us cannot answer it honestly in five seconds, and the speed of the answer matters more than the answer itself.
The busy work was never the problem. It was just the disguise.
Its time to take the disguise off and look.
References
KC, D. S., Staats, B. R., Kouchaki, M., & Gino, F. (2020). Task selection and workload: A focus on completing easy tasks hurts performance. Management Science, 66(10), 4397–4416. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2019.3419
Sirois, F., & Pychyl, T. (2013). Procrastination and the priority of short-term mood regulation: Consequences for future self. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 7(2), 115–127. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12011