My theory, people feel busy because of stress/anxiety. Not necessarily the level requiring intervention, but just low level stress.

You have a bunch of tasks to finish this week at work. You get them all done, and properly accounted you realize they only took 30 of your 40 work hours. But you feel like you've spent much more time on it. You have, you've been thinking about it. Thinking about what to do next while you're going for your coffee break makes it not a break (mentally). This is why GTD suggests you get things out of your head. Once your tasks are captured, then you can focus on the doing and not the planning to do. You can also see the true scope instead of the anxiety magnified scope ("oh god, this'll take me ages", stress, stress, get to the time, it takes 10 minutes).

Maybe we can generalize this a bit, since you can definitely be stressed/anxious but not feel busy (e.g. when you have a big presentation coming up, and you're more worried about your performance than your preparation).

I would guess that knowing you have work to do, rather than actually doing the work, is what makes us feel busy. If I have 30 things to do today, I feel busy the moment I wake up, even if my morning routine is no different than usual. If I procrastinate for 2 hours and then spend 6 hours doing 20 of those things--pushing the last 10 to tomorrow--I still feel like I've had a crazy day even though I've done less than the amount of work in a typical work day. Then I spend all evening feel restless because I really should have finished up those last 10 things, so then my whole evening feels like work.

I don't think this is entirely an illusion. Thinking about work takes mental energy; often, it takes more energy than actually doing the work. This isn't just because of stress; it's because planning (even if that planning is ultimately pointless) is an active mode of thinking.

Perhaps the solution to feeling busy all the time is to refuse to think about work you haven't started yet (unless that work is specifically a thinking task, e.g. most coding). Easier said than done, of course. Personally, I know that constantly thinking about work to be done is what keeps me from forgetting about important things I need to do. My solution to the issue was to refuse to think about doing the work, instead only reminding myself that I had to do it. This "solution" actually caused me anxiety, because thinking through work made me feel like I had it under control. Not thinking through it made me feel like I was letting it slip away, which was actually a good thing, because entirely by accident it solved my procrastination problems. It turns out that "thinking through work" was enabling my procrastination by making me feel like I was being responsible when I was making no tangible progress. The anxiety of not thinking forced me to actually do the work, and for two weeks I was basically a workaholic while I caught up on all of the things I'd been procrastinating on. But, after those two weeks were over, something magical happened: I felt less anxiety than ever before, I felt like I had tons of free time, and I had far fewer things to keep track of. I didn't feel busy, but I also had no desire to become busy, because I knew I was still doing as much work as ever, if not more. The difference was entirely based on my thoughts outside of the time spent working.

True. Rereading my post made it sound like all busy people fell into the category I described. I didn't mean it to sound that way. Just that many of us who find ourselves busy aren't busy doing but busy worrying and doing. Removing or reducing the worrying changes a lot of how you perceive your time, resources, and workload.

To reduce the amount of time you think about work, capture it in a planner or app. Just record what needs to be done. Start prioritizing it. Turn this into a routine and over time a great deal of the mental burden is reduced. Initially it's quite stressful as you may feel overwhelmed by the amount of captured tasks. But once you start prioritizing and scheduling them, especially the repeated onse that only have to be captured and planned once, things smooth out quite a bit.

One reason I feel busy - there are a great many things in adult life that require attention, but are actually intractable.

For example, all the goods and services we need that are provided by a confusopoly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusopoly) of providers - phone plans, health insurance ("open enrollment" season), cable internet access, insurance, investments, real estate.

These are all areas of life that we must engage with, but are also huge time sinks - one can research for hours, days, or years, and not get anywhere further than a feeling of frustration and having been "busy", and we can't solve these things with any finality - next year, it's the same stuff all over again.

Mentally, this is so much worse than actual, proper work, where we can sit down, do it for a few hours, and at the end of it have something that is done, will stay done, and never need redoing.

The same is true for me. Not having work at work leaves me more worn out.

Or, possibly worse than having no work, having small amounts of annoying work, but nothing else. The worse is when all I have to do all day is this one annoying bug I havn't been able to figure out. It should take 2 hours to solve but it ends up taking three days.

I'm most energized when I start a new project and I have lots of stuff to build.

Sounds like you're a programmer too. I wonder if any other professions have this problem.

Believe it or not, I have the opposite perspective. I'd rather spend a whole week debugging something in a gnarly legacy system than architect/build one from scratch. I like being able to say, "it wasn't working before; now it works," and then get on with my life, rather than live with the consequences of a hundred wrong turns. Different strokes, I guess!

If you have a clear bug and you nail it that's a great feeling. But what's annoying for me is when you have a simple task of doing X, but you then realize that you need to replace Y for this, but A replacement doesn't work with B part and so on.. and when it's all done, few days later, all you've done is you just finished that simple 1 hour task.

That's what's killing me currently. Get a task, fairly straight forward, legacy system makes debugging a nightmare, end up spending a day or two on a task the output of which is < 10 LOC.

I definitely recognize this feeling. Some days everything fit and it's a clean implementation, but a lot of times there are tangential tasks that are never "seen" in the implementation. This can of course be reflected in scrum points or whatever, but is this an issue with our own psychology, with feature rewards or something else?

I don't know, and would like to know so I could work on it.

too of much of my day is spent on stupid stuff. Time must be guarded carefully--cut out all the crap

> To me the far more interesting question is, why do we feel so busy?

Positive/negative reinforcement? You enjoy being productive, and generally don't enjoy anxiety/stress (after a threshold). I'm not certain there's much a differentiation between undesirable stress and the sensation of being "too busy." My N=1 says they're identical and I've noticed it myself, that when I want to express how I feel about being too stressed, my mind tends towards the same vocabulary I used when I am too busy, regardless of how time consuming the stress is.

Imagine what it's like for those who actually have more than 40 hours of work to do each week. And hour and a half commutes each way.

I feel so busy because my work day is essentially 12 hours. Even at that, I know people who legitimately work more than 50 hours a week, every week. This is not sustainable. One great solution would be to start making companies pay overtime. Would create tons of jobs and a healthier society.

Let's take it a step further and make 35 hours full time. Time and a half after that.

It's the load on the back of your head (literally). If you are in a structured, predictable, organized environment with minimal interruptions - your performance is very high

Do note: the perverse case scenario for this is working at Foxconn

If at the back of your head you are processing what failure may mean, worrying about who will be upset, worrying about politics, etc. then emotional and cognitive load and stress in particular drains you out.

One thing that affected me was drinking coffee through the day, and then stopping in mid-afternoon, I found that from around 8PM to midnight that left me in sort of a zombie state. I eliminated caffeine for a few months and now I consume a smaller amount.