The rotten cult of busy-ness (part 1 of 2: the problem)

Writing a long article about the dangers of constant busyness, knowing most people won’t have time to read it? Maybe not the most self-aware thing I've ever done, I promise the irony isn’t lost on me. But if you're always too busy to stop and reflect, that might be a clear sign that you really need to.

This article is focused on describing the problem, the second part - which I'll publish next week - is focused on possible solutions.

I had a meeting with a client recently where one of the points on the agenda was 'why are we so busy, and when will it stop'.

At least they were asking the question!

But seeing this written down, in this way, gave me a jolt of recognition. I really recognise this pattern, not just with clients, but from my own experience. I spent several years as Managing Director of a busy digital agency where the pace was constant and the demands from clients, partners, and employees were always urgent.

So we got really good at reacting and juggling and quickly moving from one thing to the next, but that often came at the cost of clarity, thoughtfulness, and focus.

I remember weeks where we’d be pulled into endless back-to-back meetings whilst also trying to launch internal initiatives, respond to clients, and still somehow be expected to think big thoughts about whatever thing was coming next (technological change, sector challenges, employee priorities, business demands, the list goes on...).

We rarely (read: almost never) found the time to step back and ask if we were always doing the right things, let alone doing them well and achieving an impact.

And this dynamic (or a version of it) is something that seems to come up again and again, in conversations with clients, friends who work in the sector.

We talk about the cultural sector being 'resource constrained' and there's an assumption that that probably means there isn't enough money (there isn't), but on a practical, day-to-day level, the challenge of a lack of time because we're trying to do too much, seems just as problematic.

This isn’t a new issue. I remember speaking years ago with a then-newly appointed artistic director who said, with some despair, “we do so many things just because we once-upon-a-time got some funding for them, and we never stopped. It’s completely unsustainable.”

This 'busyness' is that feeling of being on a never-ending treadmill that's set slightly faster than you ever wanted to go.

What is busyness? More than just a full diary

When I say busyness, I don’t just mean having a lot to do.

I mean a specific kind of relentless, reactive energy.

A (mostly unenjoyable) state where urgency overwhelms importance and reactivity replaces strategy.

What it means you end up doing (in my experience):

• Back-to-back meetings with no time to reflect.
• Constant context-switching.
• Doing what’s loudest or latest, rather than what’s most meaningful.
• Never having the time to stop, think, or choose.

I was speaking to a cultural CEO recently who said, “sometimes the only way to keep up is to answer emails during meetings. But then you miss important parts of the meeting and have to ask for the minutes or a recap, and you don’t really have time to process those either. So attending ends up feeling pointless. It’s a vicious cycle.”

Busyness isn’t the same as being productive.

In fact, its noise and fury often hides extremely unproductive systems:

• Unclear priorities, when everything feels urgent, it becomes hard to tell what really matters. Without a shared sense of direction or criteria for decision-making, teams default to doing what’s loudest, most visible, or most familiar. This leads to reactive work patterns, duplicated effort, and time spent on tasks that may not align with strategic goals.
• Poor delegation, when leaders and managers don’t feel they have time to explain things properly, haven’t clearly handed over responsibilities, or struggle to let go, staff are left without the clarity or authority to act. This disempowerment creates bottlenecks, slows progress, and contributes to burnout. And when leaders themselves are too busy to think clearly, prioritise effectively, or even show up fully, things grind to a halt. Decisions get stuck. Meetings are attended in body, but the mind is often elsewhere (as described in the quote above). Work stalls because the one person who could move it forward feels swamped with other demands. The result is a leadership bottleneck, not through a lack of capability, but through systemic overload. I’ve found myself in this position too i.e. as the one person who could unblock something, but with too many spinning plates to be able to give it the attention it needed. It wasn’t about lack of commitment or care, it was just the reality of constant context-switching and no breathing space.
• Lack of boundaries, in many organisations, work seeps into every available space; evenings, weekends, inboxes, WhatsApp chats. Without clear boundaries, staff are left guessing what’s expected of them and when they’re truly 'off'. Over time, this erodes wellbeing, causes confusion and undermines focus, and makes recovery almost impossible.

It’s the feeling of drowning in work, even when much of that work doesn’t move things forward in a meaningful way.

In the cultural sector, where everything often feels deeply personal, resources are always stretched, and the pressure to deliver never lets up, being constantly busy can start to feel less like a choice or temporary state, and more like an identity you can't escape.

In my experience, it shows up in familiar, quietly corrosive ways:

• Calendars and meetings: A calendar that looks like a screen from Tetris - back-to-back calls with no space to think or eat. Weekly meetings that drift without decisions. Agendas where the strategic bit is always bumped to 'next time'.
• Decision-making: Projects that stall waiting for sign-off. Key choices endlessly deferred because no one has the headspace. Leaders double-booked and always 5-15 minutes late as they run from meeting to meeting.
• Communication overload: Email chains, Slack threads, WhatsApp groups, information fragmented over a thousand different channels with apparently no rhyme or reason about what lives where.
• Delivery pressures: Launching things in a rush because of looming deadlines and moved on from in a similar level of rush.
• Team dynamics: Reliable people overloaded by default, because they 'can be trusted'. Juniors too nervous to speak up because there's no obvious opportunity to ask questions. New staff left to guess how things work or expected to be fully up to speed after a day, because no one has time to onboard them properly.
• Planning (or lack of it): Plans written in haste, then ignored. Projects continuing just because they once had funding. Annual planning that's really just last year's to-do list, with more on top.

What’s behind the busyness?

Busyness doesn’t come from nowhere. It doesn't 'just happen', it isn't an unavoidable natural state of being.

In the cultural sector, it’s not only a result of individual habits, it’s a product of how our systems, incentives, histories, and expectations are built.

I think that to meaningfully challenge it, we need to understand what’s driving it.

It feels like there are three main areas that come together to create this dynamic.

1. Structural drivers

• Chronic under-resourcing: There simply aren’t enough people, hours, or budget to meet the ambitions and obligations many organisations carry, particularly small to mid-sized ones. This forces a constant reactive triaging of work, and a pressure to always be doing just to stay afloat.
• Short-term funding cycles: With many organisations reliant on four- or five-year funding rounds, there’s a constant need to demonstrate 'value', and that is often externally defined. This can lead to prioritising deliverables that are only important to funders, easily reported, visible, or audience-facing, even when the most important strategic work is quieter or longer-term, and perhaps less 'interesting' to those external stakeholders.
• Externally set priorities: In much of the cultural sector, priorities are often shaped by funders or external stakeholders rather than by organisations themselves. This reduces agency and makes meaningful prioritisation difficult. Leaders end up delivering on others’ agendas, rather than focusing on what matters most to their specific organisational context and mission. Every funder or partner brings a new set of expectations.
• Perception management: When funders, board members, or donors assess you not by outcomes or impact alone but by how industrious or reliable you seem, then being visibly busy becomes part of the performance. You’re not just doing the work, you’re showing that you're a safe pair of hands.

2. Cultural norms and expectations

• Mission-driven overwork: Many cultural organisations are full of people who care deeply about their work which can create an unspoken expectation that passion equals presence. "Going the extra mile" becomes the norm, and stepping back can feel like "letting the side down".
• Rewarding visibility over effectiveness: Without formalised career paths or clear and structured ways of talking about performance, progression often depends on being seen to be 'committed'. That might mean being the first to reply, the last to leave, or always saying yes.
• After-hours networking: Openings, previews, festivals, fundraisers, drinks - the cultural calendar often blurs the line between work and social life. These are where relationships are built and value is accrued. But they also create an environment where stepping away, switching off, or setting boundaries can feel like opting out of opportunities.
• No culture of ‘no’: In many teams, especially those under pressure, there’s a deep reluctance to say no - to colleagues, to funders, to artists, to opportunities. People-pleasing becomes a survival skill, and declining something feels like a failure of commitment rather than a strategic decision. Rarely if ever does a new request come with the acknowledgement that to make space for it, something else will need to pause, shrink, or stop.

3. Personal dynamics

• Validation through busyness: For many leaders and staff alike, being busy is a sign of importance and a way of proving you matter. Especially in stretched teams, being indispensable can feel like the only job security available. In this (old) Forbes article they describe that vibe quite neatly: "Have you ever noticed that when you ask someone in your company “how are you?” they are more likely to answer “busy” than “very well, thank you”? That is because the norm in most companies is that you are supposed to be very busy – or otherwise at least pretend to be – because otherwise you can’t be all that important. The answer “I am not up to much” and “I have some time on my hands, actually” is not going to do much for your internal status and career."
• Reluctance to delegate: In stretched teams, it can feel easier to do something yourself than take the time to brief and support someone else. But when leaders or senior staff hold onto too much, it reinforces a dependency cycle, prevents others from growing, and contributes to their own overwhelm. This reluctance creates more than inefficiency, it creates a bottleneck. When decisions sit with one person who is already overwhelmed, whole projects stall. It sends a quiet message to teams: don’t act until you’re told. Over time, people stop trying. The space where collaboration, initiative, and shared ownership should flourish becomes clogged with uncertainty and inertia. Delegation isn't just about sharing workload it's about building capability and trust across the team.
• Fear of missing out: When the sector is built around opportunity and scarcity, limited funding, finite commissions, sporadic gigs, it’s hard to say no. Every ask feels like it might be the last one. So we keep saying yes.
• Discomfort with stillness: When things aren’t busy, it can feel disorienting. Stillness invites reflection and reflection might mean facing up to difficult questions about purpose, value, effectiveness or direction.

Together, these dynamics create an environment where busyness is not just common, but normalised and expected.

It becomes a way to prove value, demonstrate commitment, maintain visibility, and stay connected.

But it also crowds out the space we need for the work that truly matters - the deep, strategic, reflective, creative work that actually sustains our missions and delivers meaning for our audiences.

What busyness costs us

We may feel too busy to stop and reflect but the cost of not doing so is already being paid.

Constant busyness doesn’t just exhaust people. It distorts priorities, undermines and dilutes quality, and hollows out the purpose we’re meant to serve.

Ambition and enthusiasm gets worn down

It’s worth acknowledging the people inside cultural organisations who are trying to fix this stuff.

In a digital context that might be championing the hiring of a digital lead, advocating for proper discovery phases, wanting to understand if you have the right supplier relationships, or trying to make space for more strategic conversations.

It often takes huge personal effort to get even a modest change through. And in a landscape dominated by fire-fighting and fatigue what often starts as an ambitious transformation can end up scaled down to something more 'manageable', just because that’s what people have the capacity for in the moment. The dynamic of endless busyness grinds down ambition and it saps goodwill.

Burnout and talent drain

The cultural sector is burning out quietly and constantly. Long hours, blurry boundaries, and emotional labour take their toll.

I know people working at all levels of seniority who have to extend their working hours by 50-100% beyond their 'office hours' simply to be able to get their jobs done.

So people leave.

Or they stay and detach.

Or they quietly accept that there’s never going to be time to do the job properly, and they shift into survival mode.

This is especially true in my experience working with the many teams who are expected to "just make it happen", this ranges from creative teams to operational and administrative staff. The sector is losing experienced people who are tired of being the ones who stay late, hold it all together, and never get a chance to think properly, or breathe.

And younger professionals, those we hope will become the sector’s future leaders, are surely not ignorant to this. They’re increasingly unwilling to trade health, purpose, or boundaries for a job that seems to demand everything, all the time.

Strategic drift and a loss of purpose

When every day is a scramble to keep up, there’s no space left to step back and ask why we’re doing what we’re doing or whether it’s still working.

There’s no time to consider whether our activities align with our mission, or whether they’re simply inherited habits.

I’ve sat in many rooms where the strategic questions are on the agenda, but the decision-maker is double-booked, distracted, or absent altogether (or I have been that decision-maker, trying to participate meaningfully in a strategic discussion while simultaneously catching up on unread emails or thinking ahead to the next fire I’d have to put out).

And when key decisions are repeatedly delayed - because they require thought, care, or real engagement - they slip off the radar because they get drowned out by whatever urgent priority is hammering at your door. So instead of deciding, we defer it, and defer it, and defer it.

This is how we drift slowly and subtly away from clarity, coherence, and purpose.

In my experience this evolves to a position where we perhaps do get better at doing and delivering but simultaneously get worse at thinking and deciding.

We become efficient at producing content, running events, filling spaces, but less and less certain about what success or great work really looks like.

The sector faces existential challenges such as:

• How do we remain relevant to increasingly diverse, digitally fluent audiences?
• What does financial resilience look like when public funding is precarious and earned income is unpredictable?
• How do we reduce our environmental impact in a field built around buildings, travel, and materials?
• What does the future state of the cultural sector even look like?

These are the types of questions that need time, care, and collective focus. But they rarely get a proper hearing because whatever becomes this week's or today’s crisis always demands more immediate attention.

Shallow work

Busyness breeds shallowness.

In this shallowness we answer emails instead of being thoughtful about strategy. We rush decisions instead of interrogating trade-offs. We deliver projects without the time to reflect on their impact or whether they were the right projects to begin with.

Digital work is especially vulnerable to this. How many times has a potentially transformative digital initiative been downgraded to something like 'just a refresh' or been instructed to 'just get it launched' because no one had the time to think properly about maximising its impact? How many digital leads are stuck implementing systems they didn’t choose, for outcomes no one agreed on?

Often, I hear people say "we’re too busy to think", but I think the real problem is being too busy to make real choices: to prioritise, to question, to course-correct.

A lack of structure and reflection, and a distorted understanding of success

Busyness crowds out the time it takes to do something well. Not just to finish it but to craft it. To be able to take the time to design it with care, align it with purpose, and embed evaluation. To have the opportunity to build on what’s already been learned. To reflect on what could be improved next time. To know when to stop, and when to push further.

It also erodes internal structure:

• There's no time to create strong systems or processes.
• No time to properly onboard new staff.
• No time to think about development, about skills, about the invisible, slow consideration and change that is required around complex issues.
• No time to pause and ask: is this still the right thing to do?

And it distorts how we define success.

You’ve probably seen this in your digital work - when everyone is stretched and overwhelmed, the goal becomes simply to get something delivered. A new system launched. A programme rolled out. A thing ticked off the list.

But when “delivering the thing” becomes the 'most important' measure of success, we lose sight of the bigger picture, it becomes difficult to properly engage with questions like:

• What’s the problem we are trying to solve?
• Who was this meant to help?
• What change are we trying to make happen and how will we know if it happened?

These are vital questions. But in a culture of busyness, they can start to be seen as luxuries, optional extras for someone else to worry about, if there’s time later (and there never is).

The result is that we end up doing a lot. But we’re not always sure it’s the right work or that it’s making the impact we hoped for.

How do we fix this?

In part 2, I try to think about possible solutions.

No-one can dismantle systemic overwork overnight, but that doesn’t mean we’re powerless.

I won’t pretend I have all the answers. I’ve contributed to a culture of busyness as much as I’ve tried to help others navigate it. But I do think that small, intentional shifts can start to reclaim space for the work that really matters.

But I'm fascinated to hear from you - what's your experience of this stuff? Are there causes I've overlooked or misdiagnosed? Are there effective ways you've discovered to be able to push back on this corrosive dynamic?