How busyness became a status symbol — and why it’s burning us out

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In 2019, I started working in Mercedes Benz at their Headquarters in Stuttgart. Stuttgart is a city known for 3 companies - Mercedes Benz, Porsche & Bosch.

The trio are the main employers in the Swabian region and working in one of these three companies is a Swabian’s dream. The city and its suburbs are dotted with offices of these three companies and it’s subsidiaries.

During the first week of my new job, one of the more experienced colleagues who has stayed in this company for more than 30 years remarked how fast work gets done these days thanks to email and Skype which wasn’t the case even in 2010.

Until the mid-1990s, the company had two mobile phones, the size of a mini-brick, that comes with a storage case. If someone in the top brass expect a call but they also have to travel to a place outside the company premises, they take one phone with them and the secretary forwards the call to the number.

Even until 2015 there were peons in each office whose role was to take documents that needed review or signature from office location to another. This was still the case in 2019 though it was carried out by an internal postal system for certain documents, expense claims etc. since docusign or specific software did not exist.

The thought he was contemplating was that business & work used to be very slow even 10 years ago.

But this bottleneck also leads to specialization of the work done and also improvement in the quality of the work. So what happens when the bottlenecks are resolved and the process demands a higher productivity than what humans are capable of?

And his question was answered in the post-COVID shift to remote working and Zoom meetings. What used to be an informal 5 minute chat with a colleague next to you became a 30 minute meeting. And it was also hard to turn down meeting requests as this would potentially signal that you are uncooperative or worse, a coaster.

Several studies show people treat “busyness” (including a packed calendar) as a positive social signal - higher status, more in-demand, and more competent- while lack of visible commitments can be read negatively.

But does being busy equate to being more productive?

Either way, it feels unproductive to me. Knowledge work productivity should not be measured with the same tools as measuring the productivity of a factory worker.

If we rely purely on measuring our productivity based on the time we have spent working, the number of meetings we attend or the number of projects we manage it will be the shortest path to burnout.

I specifically decided to keep this to one newsletter per week because that frequency is ideal for me to sit with my thoughts over the week, and every Saturday morning I sit down and focus completely on my writing.

While it can be tempting to use AI to generate more content and post more content, what is the point of it and who even would benefit from it. This newsletter is meant to be my reflection and the quality of this work depends on me.

Don’t get me wrong. I do use AI to check for grammatical errors and I also use prompt to play contrarian to every reflection I write. This is purely to expand my thinking rather than generating the core content.

Until then, most apps, widgets, AI tools and advice from the so-called productivity gurus are just pseudo-productivity if we use them uncritically.

I have picked up Harvard professor Cal Newport’s book titled “Slow productivity” yesterday and hopefully will shed some insights in next week’s newsletter.

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I hope you enjoyed this week's version. See you next week.

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Best wishes,

Nimalan.