How to Keep Time: How to Look Busy

Many of us complain about being too busy—and about not having enough time to do the things we really want to do. But has busyness become an excuse for our inability to focus on what matters?

According to Neeru Paharia, a marketing professor at Arizona State University, time is a sort of luxury good—the more of it you have, the more valuable you are. But her research also revealed that, for many Americans, having less time and being busy can be a status symbol for others to notice. And when it comes to the signals we create for ourselves, sociologist Melissa Mazmanian reveals a few myths that may be keeping us from living the lives we want with the meaningful connections we crave.

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The following transcript has been edited for clarity:

Becca Rashid: Ian, I was having lunch with a friend last weekend who was trying to organize a birthday party for her colleague.

Ian Bogost: Okay; great.

Rashid: And, typical story, she said she was having trouble gathering everyone because everyone was too busy and it was impossible to get them to commit.

Bogost: Of course.

Rashid: But my favorite part was that she said one person in the group said she couldn’t make it because she had to go to Crate & Barrel that night.

Bogost: She was going to Crate & Barrel?

Rashid: She had to go to Crate & Barrel at 7 p.m. on a Friday. That was already in her schedule.

Bogost: She had a flatware appointment?

Rashid: Yeah, I assume.

Bogost: Wow.

Rashid: I mean usually I don’t mind when people tell me they’re busy for work—but these kinds of reasons feel so much more common. Even though collectively, the highest-earning Americans, especially men, on average have been working less. So how can it be that everyone is constantly busy, with what? Like, I just don’t know.

Bogost: Yeah; we’re not just busy because of work, though. It’s something else too.

Rashid: I’m Becca Rashid, producer and co-host of the How To series.

Bogost: And I’m Ian Bogost, co-host and contributing writer at The Atlantic.

Rashid: This is How to Keep Time.

Bogost: I’ve been reading a little about this idea called “action addiction.” And I should say here that this isn’t necessarily, you know, fully accepted in the behavioral psychology community. There’s a lot of dispute about what kind of behavioral addictions really exist, but the idea behind action addiction is that beginning a new task—any kind of task, whatever it is—releases a little dopamine in your brain the same way that pulling the slot-machine lever does.

And in the same way that all behavioral compulsions do, that feeling decays. And then you long for more. And that’s filling our time: that desire for novel feelings, novel sensations, which we pursue instead of going out to dinner with our friends.

Rashid: Right. And I feel like many of us say we don’t have time for other people or wish we had more time for a social life, but it feels like there’s some compulsion to stay busy with random tasks and chores to the point of making ourselves unavailable.

Bogost: I wonder if that unavailability—being unavailable—is almost a point of pride?

Rashid: Oh yeah. Or a way to just signal to each other, “Sorry, I have better things to do. You should have gotten on my calendar earlier if you wanted to see me.”

Bogost: Yeah; I wonder how this happened. If it has become normalized to appear busy, culturally, when did it become accepted?

Rashid: Mm hmm.

Bogost: Why is busyness supposedly a show of importance, when it just feels terrible actually?

Rashid: Right.

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Bogost: So, Becca, I talked to Neeru Paharia a few weeks ago. She’s a consumer-marketing professor at Arizona State University, and she studies busyness.

Bogost: She had some revealing things to say about the ways that time can be a type of social asset.

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Paharia: When we think about products that are scarce, there are very few of them out there, so people really want them. When we think about a person as being scarce, then we think of scarcity in terms of time.

So, how much time do you have? Well, if you have very little time, then you, in and of yourself, are somewhat of a scarce resource. And then people might come to feel that you’re more valuable, or have more social status.

So if you, for example, try to schedule a meeting with somebody and they tell you, “Well, I have about 15 minutes at 4:15, two months from now”—that is a very clear indication to the receiver of that proposition that they must be important. Or if you go to a doctor and you can get an appointment, you know, today, your inference again might be, “Well, they must not be very good, because they’re not in demand.”

Bogost: Is this a uniquely American phenomenon? Are there other cultures where busyness has the same social status as it does in America?

Paharia: We ran studies in the U.S., and we ran studies in Italy. So in Italy, there’s more of the sense of status that the wealthy can both waste time and waste money. And that you gain your social status from your family and your family name, as opposed to the U.S., where you gain your social status by working hard, earning a lot of money, and kind of climbing the ladder in that way.

And what we found was that in the U.S., a very busy person was seen to have more social status than a less busy person. But in Italy, it was the exact opposite. So there, the person who had time for leisure was seen as having more social status than the person who had to work. And so that sort of reflects the more traditional idea that if you’re really wealthy, you don’t have to work. You have social status in terms of having money, and you have social status because you have so much time. People who have less resources have to work to buy food, to have housing. They have to work. And therefore, the busy people have a lower social status.

Bogost: You’ve looked into this in your work around the kind of humblebragging that people do around their busyness. Can you tell us a little about that?

Paharia: So humblebragging is a brag disguised as a complaint. So, I sometimes will just see what people are posting on Facebook. And one person said something like, “I had a meeting in D.C. this morning, and then I had lunch in New York in the afternoon. In Boston for dinner, for another meeting. I’m so exhausted.” I thought, Wow, like, what is the point of that post?

Bogost: What is the point of that post? Why would we want to brag about not having free time? Isn’t that what we want, in theory?

Paharia: I can speak a little bit to the historical context of it. So, there was a theory many years ago by this gentleman named Thorstein Veblen, and he talked about how the wealthy have both money to waste and time to waste. So you can waste your money on luxury products, gemstones, etc.—that kind of stuff—and you can waste your time on, you know, learning how to ride horses and learning these very intricate mannerisms of, you know, where the fork and the knives and all that stuff goes. So his theory was that the very wealthy and the very high-status people have so many resources that they could waste both their money and their time.

Bogost: Mm hmm.

Paharia: That has evolved, at least in American culture, where having less time is seen as valuable. And I think a lot of that has come from our sense of social mobility: this belief that you can work hard and climb the ladder.

Bogost: I’m thinking back to the diamonds; you need resources to buy them. But I could just pretend like I’m more busy than I really am, which might make myself appear more important. Do people run that kind of calculus? Are people thinking about their time in that way?

Paharia: Yeah; so you’re asking to what extent are people strategically doing this? I think people are doing it not necessarily with a full consciousness that, Hey, you know what, I’m going to say I’m busy, because I want people to think I’m important. But sometimes these things kind of linger in our consciousness right below the surface.

People are motivated to be busy because they’re not only signaling to other people that they’re important, but they’re signaling to themselves that they’re important.

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Rashid: So Ian, I guess it makes sense to me that we have some innate desire to feel important and valued by society standards. But I also wonder if people have adjusted their levels of busyness since the pandemic.

I mean—I would think that some of that compulsion to use every minute of our time productively, or for some future goal, is a reaction to when we couldn’t use our time in all the ways we otherwise would have.

Bogost: Oh, that’s so interesting, Becca.

Rashid: So, maybe some part of this busyness thing is to make up for that time we feel like we lost.

Bogost: It’s really tragic to think about it that way, isn’t it? That yeah, you know, the pandemic was highly traumatic and confusing, but it happened. And to continue to obsess over the lost time, and then to lose more time at trying to recuperate it, is almost worse.

Rashid: Mm hmm.

Bogost: Maybe it’s also because we are conditioned to feel like a busy person. You know, that kind of busy-bee persona where you’re always buzzing around, getting things done. And I mean, I certainly feel that way—that that’s a virtue I’m supposed to pursue.

Rashid: Hmm.

Bogost: I have like, I don’t know, half a dozen different roles: at the university, at The Atlantic, in my home life. It certainly makes me appear busy. It makes me feel busy. And sometimes I wonder: Am I busy in a good way? Or do I just appear busy?

You know, it’s easy to look busy by just doing a ton of things that maybe don’t matter.

Rashid: Right.

Bogost: And that doesn’t seem to match the spirit of what we mean, or what we think we mean, when we talk about a busy person who’s productive, and that’s why they’re busy.

Rashid: Right; and it seems like doing it well is not the point.

Bogost: I was curious to ask Neeru about that. About what it feels like, what can happen, when busyness starts to just completely take over.

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Paharia: There’s this tendency to want to overschedule yourself, and it could be coming from, “I want to feel important; I want other people to feel that I’m important.” There’s some existential dread of too much idleness—you know, if [you] have too much time, your mind might go to dark places.

I think a lot of people do try and keep themselves busy because it’s a distraction, you know, from some of the bigger existential questions that would arise about our life here on Earth and the time that we spend here. So creating a sense of busyness for yourself can lead to a feeling that you yourself have sort of a reason to be, in a way.

Bogost: Is there a way to stop normalizing busyness as an excuse?

Paharia: I feel like one of the things would be to reflect back and think about: Is it making you happy? Is it making you happy to overschedule yourself, if that is, in fact, what you’re doing? Or are you feeling overwhelmed by that?

The second question is: What is the fear behind not having a schedule? Is it that you’ll have nothing to do, or that you’ll be bored, or that you’ll then become agitated? But there is sometimes a compulsion to keep going.

Bogost: Yeah; it’s so interesting. I mean, I wish there were easier answers. But you’re right. It’s so hard to stop.

Paharia: One of the things we do in our family is we try to not overschedule ourselves. So many weekends we have no plans at all, and have a few other families and friends who also have no other plans. And so then it becomes more of a spontaneous kind of way to get together with people. It gives us some space, you know: “Hey, what do we feel like doing right now? Let’s go get a coffee, or do something like that.”

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Rashid: Hearing Neeru talk about busyness as a status symbol, Ian, is kind of funny to me. It’s like this personal suffering that we inflict upon ourselves to make people think we have a life, or we’re wanted by a lot of other people—we’re popular. And at the same time, it’s its own sort of avoidance mechanism. It seems like I have so many friends who say, “I actually like to stay busy, because, you know, I don’t want to be alone with my thoughts.”

Bogost: Oh my god…

Rashid: What if we would genuinely be happier taking that time to do nothing and not feel bad about it?

Bogost: Right. Feeling bad about it…

Rashid: Instead of multitasking into oblivion—you know, like holding our phone while we’re watching a movie, or FaceTiming someone while we’re cooking dinner—always having to do a million things at once.

Bogost: Yeah. And trying to do everything all at once, it’s not even the most useful way to get things done well.

Rashid: Right, of course.

Bogost: There’s research on “switching costs,” which is just a name for the time you lose when you switch tasks. And the evidence shows that the cost of switching from reading a book to checking my phone because it buzzed could actually cause me to do both of those activities less efficiently…depending on the tasks we’re switching from and to. One study shows switching costs can lead to a loss of up to 40 percent of someone’s productive time.

Rashid: Oh, wow. I mean, I’m not totally surprised by that—but I also fall into this trap of thinking that those people who are really effective at multitasking are also the most ambitious or accomplished among my friends. But the sort of busyness for busyness’s sake, which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with accomplishing a big goal or anything like that…

Bogost: You’re just ticking off boxes. You’re doing your to-dos, even if you don’t need to.

Rashid: Right. I think it’s tough when busyness isn’t a choice. Like working parents—the people taking care of their children and their own parents simultaneously—and, you know, just keeping up with that. The dropoffs, the doctors’ appointments, the shift schedules, on top of just being healthy, having a social life. You know, I could go on and on. But that small hit of “I’ve done everything I need to do today; I’m being responsible; I’m a good productive member of society”—that little high—doesn’t feel the same as “I had the presence of mind today to ask my kid how their day went and actually hear their response.”

Bogost: Yeah. And you know, the really scary part is: It kind of does make you a good parent or whatever. You know, like you could probably go your whole career, maybe your whole life, just doing a bunch of things. Just ticking off boxes,

Rashid: Yeah.

Bogost: And people would probably judge you to have been successful.

Rashid: Yep.

Bogost: You were a noble person. What’s the alternative to doing a bunch of things? It’s like: You were slothful. You were lazy.

Rashid: Right. At least that’s the stigma, that you got nothing done.

Bogost: Even if the things you got done were meaningless, you still got them done.

Rashid: I found this interesting research about parents, whose primary concern with their teens’ social-media use—aside from just seeing inappropriate content online—the second two top concerns are kids wasting their time and not getting their homework done. Both of which feel like a value judgment about, you know: “I don’t want a lazy kid.”

Bogost: Yeah: “You’re wasting your time. What are you doing, staring at your phone?”

Rashid: Right, and maybe it doesn’t have to be “I’m lazy when I’m not occupied,” but maybe just not having busyness be the main thing that makes us feel like worthy, valuable members of society

Bogost: Yeah. It’s like: Busyness on its own isn’t necessarily the problem. You just want the right amount of it. And we definitely don’t have the right amount of it.

Rashid: I’m curious to learn from an expert who can explain where this pressure comes from to be constantly busy, be task-oriented, ahead of everything else. And I wonder if there’s a way to balance the social pressure of looking busy with the actual obligations of our day-to-day life.

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Rashid: So Ian, I talked to Melissa Mazmanian, who’s a sociologist from UC Irvine. And she co-wrote a book in 2020 called Dreams of the Overworked: Living, Working, and Parenting in the Digital Age, and her research analyzes why American adults struggle with overwork and this unmanageable busyness that she says goes beyond just schedules.

Rashid: She lays out three myths that motivate American adults to stay constantly occupied: the desire to be the ideal worker, have the perfect body, and be the perfect parent.

Bogost: Yeah, those are definitely dreams.

Rashid: So Ian, if Neeru’s saying busyness indicates to others that we’re valuable in some way, I asked Melissa to explain the other side of that—how busyness can make us feel valuable to ourselves.

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Mazmanian: I don’t think I’m alone in someone who’s always carrying—almost like you think about a wave going out, and there’s like the trickle of water after the wave that we’re carrying along. This trickle of water of all the things we didn’t get to: all the emails I didn’t answer, all the times I didn’t do my workout. All the times I wasn’t there for my children. And managing that is, I think, one of the interesting kinds of truths of living in Western society.

So first of all, I have no idea what it means to be genuinely overworked.

Rashid: Heh heh heh.

Mazmanian: I don’t know if many people do. There’s some studies that show that people will literally hit a breaking point, which means that your body breaks down, or you develop addictions of various kinds, etcetera. That’s extreme.

So what does it mean to live a sustainable life like that? You’re every day feeling like you’ll be able to wake up the next day, and maybe there’s some ups and downs. But that it feels genuinely sustainable.

One thing that was fascinating was that everybody repeatedly told us that right now was a particularly busy time.

Rashid: Hmm.

Mazmanian: And next week, or next quarter, or next month, it was going to get better. And so I think we oftentimes make sense of our busyness and our feelings of overwhelm by feeling like—if we “just get over this hump,” or this deadline.

But there’s a lot in our lives such that those humps and deadlines continually happen. We’re balancing the cycle of a school year; we’re balancing the cycle of financial quarters; we’re balancing the cycle of artificial deadlines that we make for ourselves at work and in our personal life.

We also have these kinds of life-cycle deadlines that we put on ourselves. Everything from “What age should I get married?”—I think some of these are crumbling, but—“If I want children, what age should I have children?” We are living in terms of a million kind of created deadlines, which make it feel like there is always the next thing. That “If I just get over this, I will feel better.”

Rashid: Did you find anything in your research that explains that optimism that people have? That right now is the busiest moment—but next week it’ll certainly get better, and I’ll have more free time to do the thing I actually want?

Mazmanian: So I will say one of the explicit things to mention here is that people in our study were not unhappy. These were not people who actually said, like, “I want to do less.” What they’re saying is, “I want to do what I’m doing better.”

This is everyday life that, at least for these human beings, doesn’t feel like overwork, burnout, about to lose it. This is just: “I wish I could do it with a little more sanity, a little more sleep. You know, a little less intense.”

We’ve become so committed to the idea that “doing it all” is what the goal is. That this is productivity—that this is what I need to do to feel good about who I am in the world. And so that optimism comes with the idea that I’m actually getting a lot of pleasure and satisfaction from feeling like I can be the superhero.

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Rashid: So, Melissa, moms with intense time pressure can face a higher risk of mental-health issues. So, I’m surprised to learn that in your research busy or overworked people are not necessarily more stressed or unhappy. Were there any gender differences in the optimism around busyness? Or did you discover anything about who is most likely to achieve that sort of superhero status with their busy schedules?

Mazmanian: There is research by Erin Reid that shows both men and women chafe against these ideal-worker norms in the workplace. But men have an easier time, quote, passing as an ideal worker—meaning that if they leave early, someone watches them leave early and they assume, “Oh, that guy is leaving because he’s got another meeting somewhere else,” or “He’s going to visit the client.” A woman leaves early? People tend to assume, “Oh, that woman’s leaving early because her kid has a doctor’s appointment.”

Rashid: Mm hmm.

Mazmanian: You know, we have gendered associations with how people use their time and display it at work.

Rashid: How did we go from that sort of eight-hour workday standard to becoming obsessed with controlling every little block of our days? Like the: “8 a.m. to 8:15, I’ll eat breakfast. 8:30 to 9, I’ll do my workout.” Like, how did we get to that point of scheduling every minute?

Mazmanian: Going way back in time to the Benedictine monks. This was the first place in Western society where—and this is work from Eviatar Zerubavel, scholar of time and scheduling and kind of histories of time. He looks back at the Benedictine monks as the first time where what was seen as a valued social order and a desirable social order—which is spiritually pure, I guess—is one in which time is regular at the level of the hour.

Before that, you kind of have religious rites during this time of year, or schedules based on festivals or holidays. But the Benedictine monks: They brought it down to the level of the hour. And every hour was supposed to have a spiritual purpose.

And this idea that you wake up at this time, and have the glory of God, and then you go to, you know, Mass. And in the monastery, you could look around and know what time it was based on what everybody was doing, right? So what you do first, second, third of the day was really sedimented in these monasteries. And I think you can see the roots of that into what you’re talking about in terms of our everyday life today.

Rashid: I wanted to get back to something you said earlier about these cycles of time or these cycles in our lives—all of those sort of time markers that indicate when we should do what at what time. And as that relates to the nine-to-five, like: How did we develop this cadence?

Mazmanian: So prior to the Industrial Revolution, people were working incredibly long hours. Your work and life were totally kind of merged together. And then with the Industrial Revolution and people leaving and going to factories, they were completely overworked. Exploited to the point where their bodies were breaking down and so forth.

[Henry] Ford established an eight-hour work shift on his manufacturing plants, and that was right before the Great Depression. Then the Depression happened. A lot of people got laid off. And [W.K.] Kellogg, who was the Kellogg cereal guy, he actually instituted a six-hour work shift so he’d pay people a little bit less, but get more people back at work by doing six hours. Now interestingly, Kellogg actually had another belief in the value of free time and leisure time.

And there was this whole language around the Industrial Revolution that we were going to become so efficient that everybody was going to have a ton of leisure time. And that this was actually going to be a crisis of humanity, because we wouldn’t know what to do with all of our free time. So there’s a whole academic scholarship at the time that was leisure studies, which was like: “Oh, no. What are we going to do when we all have too much time?” Well, fast-forward 100 years; that is not the case. And it turns out that in the end, the capitalist enterprise is so strong that if you have free time, people tend to commit it back to work in order to try and make more money.

So Kellogg kept his six-hour shifts, but by the 1950s, basically everyone had chosen to go back to an eight-hour shift because they wanted the two extra hours and more money. So we tend to prioritize money over time, and I don’t know why. But I think that is a bit of a moral and social value that we’ve become accustomed to.

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Bogost: So Becca, about 10 years ago now I invented this phrase: “hyper-employment.”

Rashid: Is it different from just choosing to work more in order to make more money?

Bogost: It’s the idea that you have all these little jobs that you didn’t previously have and may not be real jobs—like ones you’re not getting paid for—but you’re responsible for the work. Like, maybe you have to do your own accounting and expense reports at your job, where previously someone else would handle that work. It’d be a whole job taking care of accounting. For example, think of all the things that you do because smartphones and computers let you do them. You’re your own travel agent.

Rashid: Right, right.

Bogost: And you have to manage your personal brand on Instagram or LinkedIn or whatever. And you kind of need to do that to be a professional in the world. It’s optional but also kind of compulsory now.

Rashid: Interesting. And that hyper-employment also adds that extra scheduled component. Like, now you have to buy a movie ticket in advance, or you have to put in the work in advance to schedule it.

Bogost: Yeah; now that’s your responsibility. And if you mess it up, it’s your fault too.

Rashid: Right.

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Mazmanian: A lot of what motivates us to act, what motivates us to spend our time in certain ways, what motivates us to use technology in certain ways—well, oftentimes your core motives are truly a sense that, “You know, I’m a worthy human who’s doing the right thing, and I can feel good about myself.”

And those core senses of self? Sure, they come from personality; they come from background; they come from some innate character traits. But as a sociologist, I’m a firm believer that a lot of what gives us value is based on our society.

Rashid: But why would people aspire to “do it all” when they quite literally know that they can’t? You are giving these units of time—like, what’s appropriate to do at 8 a.m.? A workout, let’s say. It’s much harder to do at 2 a.m., at least for me. So, like, is it even possible?

Mazmanian: Well, you’re making us sound like very rational humans. And I just don’t think we are. I think that we have these kinds of values that translate into desires or thrusts or hopes or dreams, or how we feel like we should live our lives.

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Bogost: So Becca, learning to catch yourself in this act of talking about being busy or feeling busy—maybe that’s the first step to taming it. Like for me, that “How are you? I’m busy” refrain—I think it means “I know what I’m doing, but I’m disconnected from why I’m doing it or where it’s leading.”

Rashid: Interesting. So for you, the busyness feels like some distraction or cop-out from actually thinking about how you’re doing?

Bogost: Right.

Rashid: I think that Crate & Barrel story—to go back to that—bothered me because someone is trying to celebrate their birthday, and they have to also accept the fact that they’re less important than, you know, a flexible home-decor chore that obviously can be shifted around.

Bogost: Right. That could have been done anytime. But, you know, the person doing the home-decor chore—they may not even really be prioritizing it over their friend. They’re just like, “I’m busy. On to the next thing. I gotta go to the store. I’ve gotta do that.”

Rashid: True.

Bogost: I know when I’m in that mode, I just have this strong sense that I don’t know what I’m doing next, and I need to figure it out.

Rashid: And that sort of gives you some feeling of security, right? Like, I know what’s next. And you’re right: I guess maybe I’m making it more personal than it has to be, because mainstream American culture doesn’t make it particularly socially acceptable to actually tell someone how you’re feeling.

So many conversations in adulthood are what I call “life update” talks. It’s just sort of an exchange of plans and schedules and vacations coming up, and things that I have left to get done this week, and…

Bogost: “I’m going to free up right after I…”

Rashid: Yeah. I mean, shocker—it does make it harder to actually get a sense of how someone’s doing. I think it would be helpful to tap into why we do what we do, and if we could explain or communicate a bit more of that, it’s better than just, “I’m busy, and I don’t want to let you into my world.”

Bogost: Yeah. And you know when you are busy, it might mean that you’re just on autopilot.

Rashid: So true.

Bogost: “Busy”: That’s a good red flag. It’s like an opportunity to reflect, and to ask yourself, “What am I feeling in this situation? What am I doing?” And the answer might be “Nothing.”

Rashid: At least “less.”

Bogost: Or at least “less.”

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Rashid: Ian, have you ever tried eating a clock?

Bogost: Eating a clock? I haven’t tried that.

Rashid: It’s very time consuming.

Bogost: Oh my gosh.

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When was the last time you remember being alone—without using your phone, even—for more than an hour?

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