The Right Kind of Busy

Rethinking the cult of busyness

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When I asked for blurbs for my first book, Scandals of Classic Hollywood, I went in with very modest expectations. All authors are very busy, that I knew, and might need to be reminded three or four times to send the blurb. As I continued to write books and ask for blurbs, I was often told as much by the people I’d emailed in very explicit terms: I want to blurb this book, so if I don’t get back to you by the deadline, please get in touch again.

I wasn’t offended, not in any way. I think I was mostly in awe. At that early point in my public writing career, I prided myself on sticking to deadlines. I responded to all communication promptly. I read a post by a prominent blogger about only responding to emails on Monday and thought: How? Why?

I wasn’t working less — back then, in the mid-2010s, I was balancing academic obligations and public-facing writing and applying for jobs and blogging for free. But I was less busy.

I was less busy because I was, in truth, doing very few things. Working…and little else. I’ve written about all of that before, in many forms, but it’s worth highlighting how that focus made it a lot easier to be very good at email and deadlines.

Now, I often find myself writing the sorts of emails I once believed to be the provenance of very important (and thus very busy) people. It’s become clear that people sometimes become busy in order to feel important, but I mostly feel busy and guilty. I’ve tried reframing that reaction, replacing abject apologies (delays, after all, happen) with gratitude (thank you so much for your patience). Sometimes, when I’m avoiding writing or other work, I’ll plow through a bunch of emails hanging out in the inbox of shame, but I also give myself the grace to declare periodic inbox bankruptcy. I go through periods when I say no to pretty much everything followed by periods of near-universal yes. Recently I’ve had a ton of portal energy and taken on all sorts of new things: a new micro-farm, a new book, a new podcast. And I love, absolutely love, all of them.

Yet when I missed a self-imposed deadline earlier this month, I wondered: Am I too busy? Have I become a person people think of as busy? Am I, as Kierkegaard put it, “the most ludicrous of all ludicrous things,” a person “who is brisk at his meals and brisk at his work?” And what’s lost when that becomes part of how others understand you?

Maybe you’ve experienced something similar: the feeling that you want your family’s life to just slow down, to just generally do less — and be able, as a result, to feel and experience more. Last year, Dr. Pooja Lakshmin embarked upon an intentional “Fall of Less” in order to recover from the intense demands of her book tour — and to practice the “real self-care” that her book prescribes.

As she wrote then:

I’ve been burnt out for a few months now, trying as hard as I could to “rest” and go slowly. But, yet, it took something physical, a picture of my giant, chronically inflamed gallbladder for me to stop for 4 days. I’m sheepish that even as a psychiatrist, after writing a book called Real Self-Care, I’m still guilty of dismissing my needs, and only stopping when I physically CANNOT do more. 

In my therapy sessions with my psychoanalyst, we’ve talked about my embarrassment around the fact that it took something being physically wrong with me for me to stop working. I told her that this was the first time in recent memory where I felt a sense of relief that my “rest” was sanctioned. The relief that only comes when you are bone tired, exhausted, and medically excused to take a break. So it felt in my brain: I finally had a justifiable reason to focus on myself and my health. 

But I reject that idea. I don’t need a medical emergency to sanction my rest. I can sanction that myself.  Hence, the Fall of Slow. 

In practice, that meant permission to stop, permission to play (including to do work that still felt truly fun), and permission to go internal (get back in touch with her internal compass, goals, and sense of self). She was still working, she was just being a whole lot more mindful about where she was directing her energy.

I admire Pooja for so many reasons — including the way she’s modeled recuperation these past months. If you’re trying to recover from burnout, this is a really good roadmap. But at this particular moment, I am not personally burnt out (trust me, I know the symptoms!). I have a ton of creative energy. I’m skiing, which always makes me feel very alive. I’m excited about my new running goals. I’m dedicating time to my friends’ kids and also to my friends. I’m hanging out with my dogs and hanging out with my partner and hanging out with my mom. I’m going on trips and planning other ones. I’m ordering dahlia tubers. I’m processing TransSanta orders. And I’m also doing all the work stuff, too: refining the outline of the book, scheduling interviews, editing podcast transcripts, reading your thread comments, writing pieces like this, and, to bring it full circle, reading other people’s books and writing blurbs.

I am really busy! But I don’t know if I’m too busy. I’m not busy just to be busy. I don’t think of my busyness as a status symbol — in fact, a lot of what makes me busy is pretty mundane stuff like spreading compost and picking up 6-year-olds at school. I’m busy because my life is full. Not full as in “uncomfortable,” but full as in overflowing, sumptuous, abundant.

Back when I was doing the small town podcast for HGTV, one of the people I interviewed had taken the opportunity of his and his partner’s move to small town Tennessee to start a massive garden (and TikTok account). The garden is scattershot and what some people might call “overplanted,” but I’ve always found myself beguiled by his catchphrase: Abundance. A huge pile of tomatoes? That’s abundance. A few dozen potatoes dug out of rich soil? Abundance. A bunch of dried loofahs with no discernible purpose? ABUNDANCE! It’s not too much. It’s a gift, to have this much to harvest.

Clare Holdsworth, a professor of social geography, has worked to put “the cult of busyness” in historical context. Drawing on research from time-use researchers, she argues that we’re not as busy as we think we are. In aggregate, we’re working about the same amount as we were in the 1960s. Much of our feeling of busyness stems from our parenting obligations (and the professionalization of kids’ sports), our eldercare responsibilities, and other domestic duties. As I wrote last month, vacation itself might feel restful, but the preparation (to take off work, to prepare the house, to arrange the pet care) creates a storm of busyness.

But some of the busyness, too, stems from our commitments to one another. “Busyness is relational,” Holdsworth writes. “Busy working and family lives involve juggling multiple responsibilities. Tensions about busyness are often to do with a lack of autonomy. We do not have time for ourselves as we rush around doing things for other people. We also use the excuse of being busy in order not to do things for each other, either at work or home.”

And that — that’s what I want to avoid. I don’t want to hold up my busyness as a shield. I want to figure out how to balance the abundance, which includes working to find better language to describe why I might have to decline something, why and how I might need help to get something done, and why commitments to myself, my friends, my body, and my community hold just as much weight as commitments to the work I do for pay.

It’s not that I think we owe others detailed explanations when we say no to something — or that we should try to make our reasoning more dramatic or heavy to make it feel justified. “I’ve scheduled a very leisurely walk for myself” should have the same power as “I’m on kid duty that night” or “I have book club.” Right now, busyness functions as passive-aggressive performance of worth: as a parent, as a worker, as a person who is in demand and, as a such, can’t do things. But what if we think of it instead as the mark of someone who’s doing a lot for others — but also for themselves?

There’s a cautionary tale I’ve heard several times from various older people in my life. “Just wait til you’re retired,” they say, “then you’ll yearn to be busy again.” But a lot of retired people I know are incredibly busy: with their social calendars (we’ve talked before about how good boomers are at making friends) but also with the things they want to do, by turns mundane and thrilling. They go on three hour walks. They visit. They make food for themselves and others. They spend a whole day going to the gardening store. They start a photography club or do trail maintenance or make fairy doors on random trees just because. And that’s just the things that people do on my island.

The worst kind of busy makes you feel out of control. It’s defensive and brittle and terrified. It’s lonely; it dissembles. It’s also profoundly wearying — and yet it’s somehow addictive, too.

The right kind of busy is indicative of a mind in touch with itself and in deep connection with others. It’s constantly recalibrating, re-examining, we rethinking: what’s enough? What should I do more, and what should I do less? It means having a calendar that’s at once full and with built-in flex. It breathes deeply and sleeps soundly. The right kind of busy is a feast.

I don’t think I’m there yet. But that’s my heading. ●

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For discussion this week, I’d love to talk about how you’re negotiating feelings of busy in your own life — where are you now, and what work do you need to do to be where you want to be?

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