It’s time to stop humblebragging about how busy we are

Back-to-back meetings can take a toll on workers’ productivity and well-being.

It’s not uncommon for Brandon Dock to hear from execs that they’re too busy to meet.

Dock is the managing director at the recruitment firm TGC Search. Sometimes, he told B-17, hiring managers will play that “busy” card when he wants to discuss what they’d want to see in an ideal job candidate.

It’s understandable, Dock said, that managers with roles to fill would be short on time — because they’re short on staff, something he could help with.

“So you could either be busy every day for the next five weeks, as you claim, or you could take a half hour,” Dock said. “Let’s prioritize this.”

Dock and his clients are hardly alone in squaring off against calendars with more back-to-back colors than TV test patterns. Yet being that booked can be a problem for people’s productivity and well-being, workplace experts told B-17.

The good news is that there are ways to reduce the crunch and for leaders to push back on a culture that implies congested calendars are virtuous.

Busyness as a sign of worth

Joep Leussink, head of growth at AddEvent, which develops software for managing events and calendars, told B-17 that at some organizations, a full schedule is interpreted to mean that a worker is valuable — even if the time isn’t spent in the best way.

“If you have a very busy calendar, some workers use this as a status symbol,” Leussink said. “It has become kind of like a humblebrag.”

There are other indicators (like being too busy to take lunch) that some people might use to signal the significance of their to-do list.

Kate Walker, a human resources consultant and executive coach in San Francisco, told B-17 that some workers might feel pressure to keep their calendars booked up so their bosses won’t wonder what they’re doing all day.

“Full calendars can kind of look sexy,” Walker said. Yet, she said, that approach risks making workers’ presence in meetings more valued than the work they accomplish.

Walker said that she’s worked with execs who have suffered mental, emotional, and physical strain from being overbooked.

“I have a couple of clients that are really going through some pretty heavy burnout right now, based on their calendars,” Walker said.

She said an unforgiving meeting schedule can also leave little time for brainstorming, creativity, reflection, and innovation.

Meetings can stand in the way of goals

Ethan Kross, a psychologist and neuroscientist who’s director of the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan, told B-17 that if workers’ focus is consumed by “responding to emails and balancing calendars,” that’s attention that might otherwise be put toward achieving more important goals.

Taking control of our schedule — and not giving ourselves over to our inboxes while we’re at it — can help make us more efficient and “allow us to more joyfully pursue our jobs,” said Kross, who’s also the author of the forthcoming book “Shift” about managing emotions.

“Most people didn’t sign up for jobs to, you know, work on calendar and email for three to four hours a day,” Kross said.

Kross said some organizations manage to prioritize “deep work” in service of getting the important things done by identifying ways to help workers restore themselves so they return to work fresh.

Kross said that as a leader himself, he’d rather someone on his team work “eight amazing hours” than 12 with their attention fragmented.

Workers should be thinking regularly about how to be most efficient with their limited attention and time, he said.

Part of doing so, he said, is considering how they might construct systems to allow for this. For some, that might mean automating calendars as much as possible.

Do I need to be here?

Some meeting fatigue might be a legacy of the pandemic. During lockdowns, many bosses, both well-meaning and suspicious, shoehorned more meetings onto calendars to “check in.”

While some surveys indicate the amount of time in meetings has started to retreat, there are still more than many workers might like, Walker, the executive coach, said.

She recommends that workers consider asking whether their attendance in a meeting is necessary, even if the meeting organizer hadn’t listed their attendance as optional. However, doing that might be more difficult for junior employees, Walker said, who could worry that it would look bad.

Beyond asking whether attendance is necessary, it’s often OK to ask for notes from a meeting, she said. That signals people still have an interest in what’s discussed.

For those running meetings, having a well-defined agenda can keep something that should have been 30 minutes from expanding, Walker said. It’s also worth asking the age-old question of whether a meeting could instead be an email, she said.

Of course, one way of fighting fire with fire is for workers to block time on their calendars for focusing and taking breaks. Walker often recommends this to her clients.

She also suggests that workers and, if necessary, their bosses periodically review their meetings to determine what might not be necessary. Other approaches include limiting meetings to certain days.

Kross, the psychologist and neuroscientist, said that some of the most successful people he knows are “extremely judicious” in apportioning time on their calendars. Some block time for everything from focused work to exercise, he said.

“They’re putting guardrails on there,” Kross said.