How having too much to do has become the ultimate status symbol

In June, Catherine Blyth will publish On Time: Finding Your Pace In A World Addicted To Fast. Her own experience of feeling she could never quite keep up with the frequency of demands set the book in motion. ‘The seed of the book was frustration: why did my to-do list grow longer every day, why did I feel so busy, yet with seemingly little to show for it?’

She suggests an intriguing thesis. ‘Busyness,’ Blyth reckons, ‘can become an end in itself, a decoy mistaken for that useful thing, productivity’ — and that suits the masters of the tech universe. ‘Communication technologies conjure self-fulfilling sensations of busyness by locking us into dopamine loops, checking social media or newsfeeds compulsively… It is highly addictive and sows our days with distractions that make us feel as if we are doing more, even as we achieve less.’

Consciously or otherwise, people move from the ‘Very Busy’ category to the ‘Extremely Busy’ sort. But is Blyth necessarily right that multi-tasking makes us less productive? Indeed, in many fields these days, a range of tasks and outcomes is required. We’re expected to offer the full à la carte and like it or not, we’re less sought-after if we don’t. Joanna Coles — who heads up content for the media company Hearst — also oversees a US TV show, sits on the board of Snapchat as well as a non-profit that encourages female entrepreneurs.

It’s not just the glossy posse who behave like this. I recently bumped into Nouriel Roubini — the renowned economist who predicted the 2007 crash — and moaned that I had been on the road for 10 days and was a bit tired. He looked unimpressed. What had his schedule been like? ‘First night off after three weeks non-stop. Rome, Berlin, Beijing, London, New York, Utah, Washington…’ He runs a successful consultancy, presumably somewhere in the clouds.

Still, as Caryn Mandabach, the executive brains behind the award-winning drama Peaky Blinders, who divides her time between London, LA and Wiltshire while juggling multiple projects, points out, ‘If someone says they’re “slammed” it means they are not truly in control of their lives’. Busyness may be required in some arenas — but, she points out, ‘the worrying thing is an ethos that equates being busy with being productive’.

There is an underlying paradox to extreme busyness and its connection to our social or professional standing. John Maynard Keynes argued in 1930 that as living standards rose, workers would have more free time to enjoy their leisure and much shorter working weeks. On that, he was wrong: it is the relatively well-off who are taking on extra tasks and stretching the day.

My colleague Ryan Avent, economics columnist at The Economist notes a shift. ‘Long hours are largely a high-income worker thing, which wasn’t always the case. Over the past few decades hours worked by high-income workers have grown, while those for the rest have fallen a bit.’ Avent also spots a vital connection with modern urban life. ‘Long hours are the price of a high status. It’s a package deal. Cities are wonderful places to be, but it means you have to work long hours to make it work. You could change jobs or take a pay cut, but that would often make London unaffordable. And if you move you lose your friends and colleagues and the amenities, but also a sense of the kind of person you are.’

So what looks like a choice often feels like a necessity, just to live the way we want to live. It is an even stiffer challenge for millennials in an irregular job market. According to recent research by market researchers GfK, they take fewer holidays than even their diligent mid-life colleagues, fearful of missing out on the promotion ladder or of appearing too dispensable. The notion of FOMO is closely linked to compulsive busyness. It’s underwritten by anxiety about what might happen to our status if we slack off or miss out on the next opportunity.

Yet Blyth thinks the solution is closer to hand than we realise, if we take a more considered view of our relationship with technology. ‘The joy of today is that we can work any time, any place. If we use technology instead of becoming its servant or getting trapped into cycles of reactivity, the potential is liberating.’ It is the 2017 re-iteration of a poem my mother loved to cite that concludes: ‘A poor life this if, full of care/We have no time to stand and stare.’

Just as soon as this deadline passes and I fight off the jetlag, take the next slew of work calls and the army of unread emails are all addressed with a ‘thanks much’ reply, my serenity revolution starts. Don’t wait up.

Anne McElvoy is Senior Editor at The Economist