Member-only story
The cult of busy
“Hey, how are you?”
“Phew, so crazy busy. You?”
For many years, I held on to my busy-ness as a badge of honor. I would proudly brandish my calendar that’s packed with double- or triple-booked meetings as a mark of how important I was. Often when people stopped by my desk to talk to me, my snippy glare and body language let them know that I needed to get back to the urgent emails and pings on my laptop rather than take a couple of minutes to connect with a human.
I worked at design firms for 10 years. It was the perfect environment for my restless spirit. Projects were often 3–6 months long and focused on envisioning the future for all the world’s top technology companies. We all had shiny-object syndrome. Ooh, we get to work on a social gaming system! And now switch gears to design a videophone for deaf people! And now a mobile phone OS built around relationships! Woo-hoo, it’s a connected smart home! It was constant pings moving from shiny object to shiny object. I never had the chance to focus and go deep because there was always something new to do—collaborate with talented designers, run sprints with clients, create more future-facing design concepts, and shoot day-in-the-life videos of happy people fiddling with their devices. The constant stimulation and motion meant that I was never bored. My shiny-object-obsessed spirit kept happily bouncing from project to project.
Until one day I had enough of the brutal work hours, the loneliness of being one of the few female creative directions in a misogynistic culture, and years of creating concepts but rarely shipping anything. I had lost my way. I felt like a kid who’d spent too long in a candy shop and was now suffering from a massive belly-ache and longing for healthy food. This led me to years working at startups and at Facebook where I could both conceptualize the product North Star as well do the long-term work to create an MVP (minimal viable product), and iteratively launch over months and years to hone the entire product system.
Busy-ness and restlessness are both distractions and and escape from dealing with discomfort. Negative feelings such as anxiety, boredom, fear, anger are all part of the discomfort. The path of fulfillment is working through these feelings, rather than running away from them to the next shiny thing.
