The Pursuit of Optimal Busyness

I get a buzz out of working hard. In fact, when I don’t have deadlines, I get bored. I’m much less productive because I like working on adrenaline. [...] I get a buzz out of it, that’s why I do the job that I do. —Eric, director

With 2022 in full swing, many of us are packing our calendars full of meetings and projects, even if this means more work. Why do we do this to ourselves? What makes us want to keep busy, even if it takes a toll on our well-being? I (Ioana Lupu of ESSEC Business School) and Joonas Rokka (EMLYON Business School) found that how people experience time control at work impacts their perceptions of busyness. To explain professionals’ attraction toward busyness, we propose the concept of “optimal busyness,” an attractive and energizing temporal experience that professionals seek because it makes them feel energized, productive, and in control of their time. Our study shows that employees’ experience of optimal busyness seduces them into believing that they can control the temporal demands of their work, so they end up working too much.

Organizational control of time

Managers trying to motivate their employees is nothing new, nor is their use of strategies to keep people in line with the company’s goals. These strategies aim to manage their performance and their adherence to temporal norms like working hours and time management. Examples include performance evaluations, coworker behavior, and productivity technology. These impact how employees manage their time, and can encourage a poor work-life balance. They can also be hard to resist, so employees end up conforming. They can also shape how people experience their work time, making them feel temporarily invigorated and leading them to chase that feeling. We explored how professionals experience their work time as a result of organizational controls.

A study of busyness

Our interviews with professionals were focused on how people went about their daily activities and how they structured the time they spent on those activities. We compiled a dataset consisting of 146 interviews with 81 professionals, over 300 weekly diaries, fieldwork observations, and archival data like internal HR documents. This combination formed a thorough dataset of the professionals’ experiences and the firms’ practices.

Participants were employees at a global auditing firm and a law firm: fast-paced settings where long hours, intense work, and billable hours are the norm. They spoke about the highs and lows of their careers and personal lives, how they coped with deadlines and the fast-paced work rhythm, how they felt during busy vs. quiet periods, and the factors impacting their stress levels.

Busyness as a result of organizational controls

Busyness was a recurring theme. We also noticed a perplexing pattern: even when people felt their work-life balance was off, they preferred busy periods over quiet ones. From this, we identified three key temporal experiences: quiet time, optimal busyness, and excessive busyness. Organizational conditions shape these experiences.

To understand how organizational conditions are linked to the notion of time, we explored the “temporality of controls:” the structuring, rarefying, and synchronization of time.

Structuring time refers to how professionals’ time is organized: We looked at deadlines and timesheets. These shape how people allocate and account for their time — and even justify their worth, since if they meet deadlines and bill more hours, they’re seen more positively. Timesheets also encourage people to minimize the time they spend on non-billable hours.

Rarefying time makes time feel scarce and fosters a feeling of urgency. We focused on this construction of urgency and short-term deadlines, and on “temporal intensification,” meaning people work faster to squeeze in more work. These contribute to a focus on the present, rather than long-term value creation and planning.

Synchronization of time, the third type of temporality of controls, means aligning organizational and individual time experiences through attuning and time collectivization. Attuning means getting employees on board with the work rhythm: for example, providing laptops and phones to ensure people are constantly connected. Time collectivization means creating a shared experience, like sacrificing one’s time to achieve a common goal. By creating this shared higher purpose, team members bond and a time management norm is born.

The use of these controls influences employees’ perceptions of their activities, resulting in periods of quiet time, optimal busyness, and excessive busyness. Importantly, employees’ experiences will differ based on their own perceptions of the controls. When they feel like this control is overused, it leads to excessive busyness (high levels of the three controls), and individuals feel fatigued, less productive, and report more work-life conflict. When they think that control is underused (weak levels), they experience quiet time, and feel less productive, bored, and anxious, though with less work-life conflict. And like Goldilocks, when they see control as balanced (moderate levels of all three), their temporal experience is “just right” and they experience optimal busyness. People tend to oscillate between the three states and the accompanying emotions. They also noted that the periods of busyness were best when they were short and the end was in sight- and long quiet periods also made people feel anxious and bored. This suggests that organizational controls still had an impact even when they were less present.

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Professionals also try to shape their own temporal experience to achieve this state of optimal busyness, since it feels energizing and productive and they feel in control — but this is a flawed approach and can lead to overwork in the attempt to hit the sweet spot. They do so by a process called control of temporality, which involves changing their pace, the target of their focus, and the length they see the busyness being. By pushing themselves to work at a faster pace (including using coffee or other substances), focusing on the short-term, and telling themselves the busyness will be short-term, they try to continuously achieve optimal busyness.

What can we learn from optimal busyness?

We found that organizational controls influence employees’ temporal experiences by structuring, rarefying and synchronizing time. When employees experience a balanced level of all three, they experience an optimal busyness state. This indicates that they feel adequate organizational pressure, that this pressure is not overwhelming, and they still feel in control of their time. Professionals also try to replicate this themselves by modifying their own behaviors.

While this optimal busyness can lead to positive feelings and productivity in the short-term, over time it can lead to overwork, decreased productivity and motivation, and work-life conflict. While optimal busyness is fleeting, employees will continue to chase it through their use of time.

These findings shed light on the relationship between organizational control and time, and on why people are drawn to long hours and comply with demanding time pressures: the pursuit of optimal busyness. Like the employees interviewed, many people nowadays look for excitement and adrenaline in their work, epitomized in the search for optimal busyness, but because work does not have an end, this often ends up making them overwork.