The Drift Towards Busyness

A few weeks ago, I had a long chat with my daughter.

She’s 14 now—an age where parents are usually tolerated more than actively sought out—so an uninterrupted conversation felt oddly refreshing and nostalgic. We spoke about what she wants to do with her life, what excites her, where she thinks she’s “good”, and what she wants to become.

Listening to her, I was struck by two things.

The first was how familiar it all sounded. At 14, I too wanted to become the best version of whatever I found myself drawn to. Most of us did. Our ambitions were built around curiosity, possibility and a belief that life could hold many things at once.

The second was how different her starting point was from mine. She has access to an astonishing universe of information, AI tools, communities and “hacks”—as she calls them—to accelerate whatever she wants to learn or create. She doesn’t see being busy as a burden. She sees time as something to shape intentionally.

Art, theatre, academics, friendships, sport, content, music—they all coexist in her world without contradiction. And somehow, she manages all of it with remarkable energy. Not perfectly, not without stress, but with a sense of agency and joy.

Watching her, I found myself wondering: what changes between then and now?

Because when I look at the modern corporate workplace, I see people who are no less talented, ambitious or capable. Yet many seem perpetually exhausted, and quietly devoid of purpose. Calendars overflow. Meetings multiply. Work quietly expands into evenings, weekends and holidays until it occupies every empty space available to it.

And somewhere along the way, “balance” itself becomes suspect.

The person who protects time for family, fitness, creativity or rest is subtly viewed as less committed than the one who is permanently available. Exhaustion becomes a badge of seriousness. Busyness becomes status.

The irony is hard to miss.

As children and teenagers, we are encouraged to explore widely, cultivate individuality and pursue excellence through passion. Yet adulthood—particularly corporate adulthood—slowly rewards the opposite: productivity without pause, achievement without reflection, and motion without intentionality.

Over the last two decades as a management consultant, I have spent an unreasonable amount of time in flights, hotels, conference rooms and client offices. There were years when I lived out of a suitcase five days a week, on assignments that kept me away from home for months at a stretch.

And somewhere during those years, I realised something uncomfortable.

The problem was not intensity. The problem was drift.

The problem was not intensity.

The problem was drift.

Corporate life becomes dangerous not because work itself is bad, but because work is infinite. There is always another deck to refine, another stakeholder to manage, another opportunity to chase, another fire to put out. Left unchecked, work slowly stops being something you do and starts becoming the default operating system of your life.

The drift is subtle at first.

It looks like taking a call while playing with your children because “this will only take two minutes”.

It looks like sitting through a late-night review meeting while your family eats dinner around you.

It looks like travelling for meetings even when your spouse is unwell because somewhere you’ve convinced yourself that physical presence equals commitment.

It looks like repeatedly postponing exercise, hobbies, friendships and sleep—not consciously, but because work always appears marginally more urgent.

I have done all of this.

And over time, I began noticing the same patterns around me.

Leaders proudly speaking about not taking vacations. Colleagues attending calls from hospital rooms. Managers who know every escalation on a client account but barely know what their children are currently interested in. Teams trapped in cycles of performative urgency where everyone is busy, but spending little time thinking.

This drift rarely announces itself dramatically.

It accumulates quietly through thousands of small permissions we give work every day.

The only antidote I have found is intentionality.

Not the Instagram version of intentionality—morning routines and productivity theatre—but the much harder discipline of deciding what truly matters and then repeatedly aligning your time, energy and relationships around it.

For me, that started with becoming far more explicit about priorities.

I realised that “doing everything” was often just another form of avoiding the harder question: what deserves my attention right now?

Paradoxically, constraints created freedom.

Once I became clearer about what mattered—and equally importantly, what did not—the mental sprawl reduced. I stopped confusing responsiveness with effectiveness.

Some of the changes were surprisingly small.

I started choosing flights with timings that allowed me to sleep properly, read and arrive functional rather than exhausted. I began planning calendars and expectations with teams well in advance rather than operating in perpetual reaction mode. I increasingly asked for written inputs before meetings so I could prepare thoughtfully and sharpen questions before walking into the room.

The quality of conversations improved. More importantly, the noise began to reduce.

The second shift was realising that productivity in modern corporate life cannot remain an individual sport.

Early in our careers, many of us are rewarded for personal heroics. But over time, the real leverage comes from building ecosystems around us—teams, peers, mentors, collaborators, clients—people aligned not merely through authority, but through trust and shared purpose.

Ironically, one of the greatest productivity hacks is generosity.

I realised, for instance, that one rarely struggles to get cover during vacations if one has consistently protected that same space for others. When managers never deny leave casually—and willingly step in to absorb pressure when team members need time away—teams often respond by protecting those boundaries collectively.

Similarly, empowering junior colleagues early, backing them during difficult stakeholder interactions, and trusting them to present ideas before they feel fully ready often changes how they see themselves. More often than not, people rise faster when they feel trusted.

Helping people without immediate transactional intent. Investing time in younger colleagues. Being transparent about trade-offs. Asking for help without insecurity. Empowering teams instead of hoarding control.

When people feel trusted and included, trust compounds.

And that compounding creates space.

Space to think. Space to breathe. Space to have a life outside work without constantly carrying guilt.

Over time, I became equally intentional about protecting that space too.

I stopped treating personal time as whatever remained after work. I started treating it as something worth designing deliberately.

For example, one small rule I made for myself is to never eat dinner alone while travelling. No matter which city I am in, I try to meet someone—a friend, an old colleague, a cousin, sometimes even an acquaintance I barely know. The meal itself is irrelevant. The point is to resist slipping into transactional isolation and to remind myself that life exists outside PowerPoint slides and hotel rooms.

Similarly, I became far more protective of weekends and vacations—not just for myself, but for my teams.

I realised that if leaders send emails and create urgency through weekends, the spillover eventually consumes everyone. So some boundaries have to be enforced consciously, because organisations rarely create them naturally.

Of course, none of this works perfectly.

There are still missed events. Delayed holidays. Weeks when balance collapses completely. Corporate life continues to demand trade-offs, and intentionality does not eliminate them.

But it does make the trade-offs conscious.

And perhaps that is the difference.

Because when I look at my daughter and her generation, what strikes me is not merely their ambition. It is their refusal to believe that identity must collapse into a single dimension.

They instinctively understand something many of us forgot somewhere along the way: that a meaningful life is not built by optimising one thing endlessly, but by remaining alive to many things at once.

A meaningful life is not built by optimising one thing endlessly, but by remaining alive to many things at once.

Maybe adulthood is not supposed to extinguish that instinct. Maybe the real challenge is learning how to protect it.

Dig Deeper

Three reflections from the Founding Fuel archives on work, identity, ambition and the lives we quietly postpone while staying busy.

• The Happiness We Keep Postponing We tell ourselves the good life begins after the next milestone. Haresh Chawla makes the case that joy isn't waiting somewhere else—it's already present in the ordinary day, if only we slow down enough to notice it.
• Alive in the In-Between What if the pause between projects—or careers—isn't wasted time, but the most important work you'll do? Kavi Arasu argues that transitions, tended well, are where renewal actually begins.
• Live the Life You Wish to Live The real obstacle to a life outside work isn't time—it's intent. Two leaders with punishing schedules share how they made space for music and biking, and what those pursuits gave back to them—in clarity, resilience, and joy.