In my 2019 book, The Power of Human, I recount an anecdote about a man who immigrated to the United States and soon came to believe that the word “busy” meant “good” because when he asked people, “How are you doing?” they often responded, “Busy.” Nora Rosendahl, the chief operating officer of the performance coaching firm Hintsa, discovered the same thing when she conducted a small social experiment by documenting answers to the question “How are you?” over the course of a week. By her count, nearly eight out of 10 people said, “Busy.”

Academic research suggests that our days are becoming increasingly jam-packed. One analysis of holiday letters indicates that references to “crazy schedules” have risen dramatically since the 1960s, for example. And an analysis of Gallup data by Harvard Business School’s Ashley Whillans found that the percentage of employed Americans reporting that they “never had enough time” rose from 70% in 2011 to 80% in 2018.

The reasons for the rise in “time poverty” (as social scientists have termed it) are numerous and nuanced, but corporate cultures that value busyness are at least partially to blame—and in theory should also be easy to correct. Put simply, busyness has become a status symbol. Research led by the Columbia marketing professor Silvia Bellezza shows that people perceive others who are busy—and who use products indicating they’re busy (like a Bluetooth headset for multitasking)—to be important and impressive. In addition, newly published studies led by the psychologist Jared Celniker have found that across the United States, France, and South Korea, people consider those who exert high effort to be “morally admirable,” regardless of their output. This is a marked change from bygone eras. As the sociologist Jonathan Gershuny notes, “Work, not leisure, is now the signifier of dominant social status.” Or as Gordon Gekko puts it more prosaically in the movie Wall Street, “Lunch is for wimps.”

But when it comes to corporate life, busyness is not a virtue, and it is long past time that organizations stopped lionizing it. Evaluating employees on how busy they are is a terrible way to identify the most creative and productive talent. Yet many firms reward and promote only people who display how “hard” they’re working. The effect on companies and their employees is significant. Research indicates that when organizations overload employees, base their incentives primarily on the amount of time they work, and excessively monitor their activities, productivity and efficiency actually drop. Exhaustion among employees can increase turnover, at considerable cost to firms’ financial performance. Even if employees don’t leave, busyness harms the bottom line by reducing staff engagement and increasing absenteeism. It also impairs workers’ health: A 2021 World Health Organization report showed that overwork can increase the risk of stroke, heart disease, and ultimately death. Conversely, research suggests that reducing working hours to manageable levels can enhance productivity.

My sense is that managers now are more open to reconsidering the value of busyness than they have been in a long time. A tight labor market that has increased the negotiating power of overstretched employees is one factor here, but the pandemic has changed the corporate zeitgeist, as time away from offices has led people at all levels to reassess their relationship with their jobs. Last year a TikTok post about “quiet quitting”—when employees refuse to work beyond their prescribed tasks and hours—went viral and became the subject of a media frenzy. Certainly, there’s something in the air.

Drawing on academic research that I and others have done and on my experience advising companies looking for humane, productive ways to help employees manage their time, I have uncovered several reasons why the obsession with busyness persists even in today’s knowledge economy. I’ve also identified practical solutions for companies trying to break out of this widespread but destructive pattern.

Why We Revere Busyness

One of social psychology’s canonical findings is that the harder people work to achieve something, the more they value it. Known as “effort justification,” this tendency arises even when a task is meaningless. And the more demanding the effort is, the more commitment people feel. New hires forced to work long hours on a graveyard shift, for instance, might persuade themselves, If I work this hard, I must really want to be here. The problem is that while we go on justifying the slog, we fail to notice burnout creeping up on us.

Once a culture of busyness is established, it tends to persist unchallenged. In an influential 1988 article, the management scholars Blake Ashforth and Yitzhak Fried wrote that a lot of organizational behavior is mindless. Production workers “go on automatic,” employees follow established rules and procedures without questioning their effectiveness, and managers make hires and promotions based on superficial cues and first impressions. Indeed, much of what managers believe to be institutional knowledge and culture is actually just bad habits.

Dru Armstrong, an experienced CEO whom I have done some consulting work for and who is now the head of the fintech company AffiniPay, has observed that sometimes “busyness becomes the fabric of organizations.” In other words it gets embedded in day-to-day activities unless leaders can explicitly root it out through a strategic plan. “Absent very clear strategic priorities, people create endless amounts of work based on what they think matters,” she explains. “You’ll say, ‘I need you to focus on this priority,’ or ‘I need you to move on price,’ or ‘We need to go buy a company or partner with a new organization.’ And everyone goes, ‘Well, I can’t—I’m way too busy.’ And then you say, ‘Busy doing what?’”

When organizations encourage busyness, employees rarely resist. That’s because even if they recognize the downside of unproductive efforts over the long term, in the moment they deplore idleness. In one famous experiment, the psychologist Timothy Wilson and his colleagues found that 67% of men and 25% of women chose to press a button to electrically shock themselves rather than sit still with their own thoughts in a lab room. Before entering the room, participants had stated that they would pay money to avoid an electric shock, but once they were left alone, the inactivity became too much to bear, and people sought to fill the void.