Tim Kreider’s essay “The Busy Trap,” published today in The New York Times, is one of those pieces that makes you uncomfortable in a productive way. His core argument is simple: most of the busyness we complain about is self-imposed, and the complaint itself has become a form of boasting.

He’s right. And I think most of us know he’s right, which is what makes the essay sting.

The Busy Badge

Somewhere along the way, “I’m so busy” became the default answer to “How are you?” It replaced “fine” as our reflexive response, but unlike “fine,” it carries a payload. It signals importance. It signals demand. It tells the other person that your time is scarce and therefore valuable.

Kreider calls this out directly. The people who tell you how busy they are, he writes, are almost never the ones doing genuinely demanding work. They’re the ones who have filled their calendars with obligations they chose, then wear the resulting exhaustion like a merit badge.

Anyone who has managed a technology organization knows the difference between genuine demand and manufactured busyness. Product launches with hard deadlines. Cross-timezone coordination. Decisions that can’t wait until Monday. That kind of busy is real, and it comes with the work.

But across every organization I’ve worked in, a portion of what fills the calendar is not genuine demand. It’s activity that feels productive but doesn’t move anything forward. That kind of busy is a choice, and Kreider is right to call it out.

Productive vs. Occupied

There is a meaningful difference between being productive and being occupied. Productive means you’re generating output that matters. Occupied means your calendar is full. These two states overlap less often than we’d like to admit.

I wrote earlier this year about making business meetings more productive. The motivation behind that post was noticing how much organizational time gets consumed by meetings that accomplish nothing. A room full of smart people sitting together for an hour is not inherently valuable. It’s only valuable if something comes out of it that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

The same principle applies to individual work. Answering 200 emails in a day feels productive. Your inbox is empty. You were responsive. But if none of those emails moved anything meaningful forward, you just spent eight hours on overhead.

Kreider makes a stronger claim than mere efficiency, though. He argues that idleness itself is valuable. Not as a reward for hard work, but as a necessary condition for creative thought. The best ideas, he suggests, don’t come from grinding through task lists. They come from unstructured time when your mind is free to wander.

The Case for Doing Less

This resonates with something I’ve observed repeatedly in technology organizations. The engineers and product thinkers who produce the most original work are rarely the ones with the fullest calendars. They tend to be the ones who protect blocks of uninterrupted time. They close their doors (or put on headphones, since doors are increasingly rare). They skip optional meetings. They are, by the “busy” metric, underperforming. By the output metric, they’re carrying the team.

The problem is that organizational culture rewards visibility. The person who’s in every meeting, who responds to every email within minutes, who’s always “on,” looks like a high performer. The person who disappears for three hours and comes back with a breakthrough looks like they were slacking off until the moment the breakthrough lands.

As a leader, I think about this tension often. How do you build a culture that values output over activity? How do you give people permission to be idle when idleness is what produces their best thinking? It’s harder than it sounds, because the instinct to fill time runs deep. We’ve been trained since school that sitting quietly and staring out the window is misbehavior.

Why Doing Less Is Harder Than Doing More

Kreider touches on something worth emphasizing: doing less requires more courage than doing more. Saying yes is easy. Saying no means you have to defend the empty space on your calendar, to yourself and to others. It means trusting that the unstructured hour will produce something, even though you can’t point to a deliverable in advance.

I’ve become a father recently. My son is three months old. Nothing clarifies the cost of misallocated time like a small person who will only be this age once. Every hour I spend in a meeting that didn’t need to happen is an hour I can’t get back, and the opportunity cost is no longer abstract. That’s not sentimentality. It’s arithmetic.

Kreider’s prescription is modest. He’s not arguing for retirement or dropping out. He’s arguing for honesty. Stop pretending that busyness is something that happens to you. Acknowledge that you’re choosing it, and then ask whether you’re choosing well.

Read the Essay

I rarely suggest that people save articles and revisit them, but I’m doing it here. Read Kreider’s piece in today’s New York Times. Then read it again in a month. The busyness trap is not a problem you solve once. It’s a tendency you have to keep catching yourself in.

The practical test is simple. Next time someone asks how you are and you’re about to say “busy,” pause. Ask yourself: busy doing what? And for whom? If the honest answer is “busy doing things I chose, for reasons I can no longer articulate,” then maybe it’s time to choose differently.