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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
A transformative guide to breaking free from unproductive busyness
Why is it that in a world demanding constant connectedness, we somehow feel lonelier, more burned out and more disengaged than ever before? Busy Idiots explores how and why we find ourselves constantly busy — but getting nothing done. Through revealing anecdotes and insightful analysis, this book will show you how to break free from unhealthy habits and focus on what counts. You’ll discover strategies to help you manage technology, navigate daily demands and collaborate more effectively — so you can conquer today's workplace culture of unproductive hustle.
Whether you need to manage your busy boss or lead your team by example, you’ll learn how to boost efficiency, foster real connections and cut through the noise. With practical, real-world solutions you can apply at work and home, Busy Idiots is a roadmap for cultivating positive productivity, happiness and growth.
- Understand how today's tech invades your brain and amplifies your busyness, with valuable insights from psychology and neuroscience
- Discover actionable tips and frameworks to help you take control of your time
- Learn how to build engagement and connections that not only foster high performance but also boost your wellbeing
- Find your sweet spot when it comes to working from home, hybrid work and teamwork
- Balance your career and your personal life, with strategies to be more present at home and find joy outside of work
It’s time to escape the busy trap. Busy Idiots will show you how.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
About the authors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
What/who is a Busy Idiot?
Busy Idiot Jon
Did we take a wrong turn?
Give me some good news …
PART I: Manage your tech
CHAPTER 1: How did we get so goddamn busy?
Learn how to harvest tech with the Sustainable Tech Blueprint
Sustainable knowing: learn the tenets of persuasive design
Understand persuasive design’s endgame
CHAPTER 2: How to stop bouncing around like a Busy Idiot
Audit your tech use
Harvest tech — some software solutions
Consider hardware solutions to reduce your tech addiction
Use harvest trees to find what works best for you
Emails to go
Get out of your inbox
Screen your screen time
The temple of doom(scrolling)
Get the message
Escape the messenger apps
Keeping watch
Stop the stream
PART II: Manage your work and family life
CHAPTER 3: How to manage your busy boss
Natalie and her busy boss
Control your calendar
Handle conflict with grace
Be careful with ‘yes’
Think straight, talk straight
Choose how you communicate
Stay in holiday mode and do nothing
If it’s them and not you, hatch an escape plan
CHAPTER 4: The challenges of loneliness and disconnection
Neural pathways: use ‘em or lose ‘em
Understand the science behind neural pruning
Compare different workplace models through a neuroscience lens
Break out of the loneliness loop
Is WFH, hybrid or in-the-office best? Get off the fence!
CHAPTER 5: You can’t go it alone: how to form productive teams
Mike the top performer vs his project team
Start as you mean to go on
Avoid hybrid hell
Don’t make AI your busy accomplice
Map your Team Pact
Lead by example
CHAPTER 6: Family life: work to live or live to work — it’s your call
Juggling priorities
How to quell the uprising: kids and technology
Conclusion Conclusion
Imagine a world free of Busy Idiots?
Imagine a world free of Busy Idiots?
What is the problem then?
Why did you have to call us idiots?
Get in touch
References
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 6
Conclusion
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 3
Table 3.1 task prioritisation
Table 3.2 a time budget
Chapter 5
Table 5.1 onshore team profile
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 the five stages of the Sustainable Tech Blueprint
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 TSTS meeting plan template
Figure 3.2 TSTS meeting plan
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 a better framework for kicking off projects
Figure 5.2 sample team planner
Figure 5.3 the Team Pact template
Figure 5.4 example of a completed Team Pact template
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
About the authors
Acknowledgements
Introduction What/who is a Busy Idiot?
Begin Reading
Conclusion Imagine a world free of Busy Idiots?
Get in touch
References
End User License Agreement
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First published 2025 by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd
© Bradley Joseph Marshall and Jonathan Outlaw 2025
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Busyness, or rather our obsession with busyness, is the biggest, yet still unspoken issue in the modern workplace.
About the authors
Brad Marshall and Joff Outlaw have been friends for over a decade. Together, they help some of the world’s best-known companies to increase their organisational productivity and employee happiness by combining psychology with real-world business insights. Through their high-energy speaking and workshop facilitation, they prove that work doesn’t have to be miserable. They are on a mission to put an end to the corporate love affair with busyness.
Brad Marshall
B.A. Psych; M.Beh.Sci; M.Res; PhD candidate
Brad is an internationally published author, speaker and workshop facilitator, psychologist and researcher. His previous books, How to Say No to Your Phone and The Tech Diet for Your Child & Teen, have been published in more than a dozen countries and multiple languages. But it’s his clinical experience that sets him apart from other speakers in the field of healthy tech use, productivity and connection. While others speak about research and hypotheticals, Brad delivers from a place of deep real-world experience, drawing on 15 years as Director of the Screens and Gaming Disorder Clinic in Sydney, Australia.
Brad is a thought leader who enjoys cutting through ‘psycho-babble’ jargon to help his audience to harvest technology and not let technology harvest them. He is passionate about the neuroscience around loneliness and the need for real connection in this disconnected and lonely modern world.
Joff Outlaw
BA Hons English and History
Joff Outlaw is a seasoned business leader with over two decades of experience in digital and technology consulting, having made significant contributions to the industry in the UK and Australia. During a distinguished career Joff has been associated with some of the world’s largest technology and management consultancies, including Accenture, PwC and Wipro. As the A/NZ Managing Director of Designit, one of the world’s largest strategic design agencies, Joff has shaped innovative digital solutions for some of the world’s largest brands. Alongside his corporate endeavours, Joff is a sought-after Speaker and workshop facilitator.
In his spare time, Joff and his wife George are kept busy (in the right way) with their three young children. They live close to the Royal National Park in Sydney, Australia.
Acknowledgements
From Brad
To my wife, Ashlee. For your unwavering support every time I come to you and say ‘I have an idea’. You stand by me going down the rabbit hole every time. Thank you.
From Joff
Firstly, thank you to my wife George, who has always been (and always will be) the better half. Thank you to my wonderful children Arthur, Louis and Eve for making me laugh every single day without fail.
Thank you to Andy Polaine for our decade-long (and counting) conversation about rubbish PowerPoint presentations, design and sourdough bread.
Finally, thank you to my beautiful Mum and my Dad, the best business mentor anyone could ever ask for.
IntroductionWhat/who is a Busy Idiot?
First, a confession. Joff’s guilty pleasure is watching Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. He can happily waste an entire evening watching chef Gordon Ramsay become increasingly exasperated with restaurant owners before he finally gets his way by simplifying the menu and painting the walls white instead of crimson. Ramsay has a unique talent for insults, and in one episode he utters the words, which still resonate with Joff 13 years after the show aired:
‘ … you’re a busy idiot.’
It was directed at a chef and it was anything but a compliment.
So what does it mean in the context of this book?
A Busy Idiot is like a hamster on a treadmill, running at breathtaking speed but going nowhere fast. They set up a meeting without an agenda and spend much of the meeting discussing what the agenda should be. So they set up another meeting, again with no agenda, and this goes on week after week. Busy Idiots are masters of multitasking; there’s nothing they can’t do … provided it takes less than 30 minutes. They have no time to focus on bigger, more important strategic projects. Their phone is like a gun in a holster ready to be drawn the instant they feel it vibrate. They respond to emails too at lightning speed. Their emails often contain open-ended questions, which lead to more emails. They change their minds constantly; what was important yesterday is forgotten the next day. Everything has to be done now, everything is urgent!
In meetings, they nod along enthusiastically but they’re not listening. In virtual meetings, they have several instant messaging conversations on the go. They love the pace and the dopamine kick from getting work done! Except work is never done. The busy idiot works longer and longer hours. Their calendar looks like a maniacal game of Tetris, with the sound on full blast. The business results don’t follow and team attrition is high. Business leaders sometimes defend the busy idiot and point to their long hours and hard work, but the reality is that a busy idiot is just busy being busy.
Here, admittedly with more than a dash of hyperbole, is what a week in the life of a Busy Idiot might look like in a modern workplace. We sincerely hope this story doesn’t feel too familiar to you.
Busy Idiot Jon
Jon works as a Customer Experience (CX) manager at a leading UK bank. It’s his job to monitor customer feedback and sentiment and identify ways to improve the bank’s net promoter score (NPS). His key performance indicator (KPI) is improving revenue growth by selling more home loans. Jon lives with his wife Sam, who also works fulltime, and their two young boys aged nine and eleven.
Jon starts Monday morning with no clear picture of what he’s going to do or achieve. Instead, he dives into his inbox and works through the 50 emails he’s received over the weekend. They’re mostly internal, and it’s lunchtime before he’s answered them all. After lunch Jon dials into his series of diarised 1v1s with his team of four. The conversations are unstructured and informal. They’re supposed to last 30 minutes but often go on longer. Jon does most of the talking, thinking out loud about some of the challenges the bank is facing. He rarely asks for his team members’ ideas. At the end of each call he typically dishes out some half-baked actions. His team have learned to ignore these actions, as Jon usually forgets what he’s asked them to do by the following week. Jon does this every Monday. In the evening, through dinner with his family, he sits at the end of the table scrolling his phone and answering emails.
On Tuesday, Jon prepares for the internal reporting call with his superiors that happens every Wednesday fortnight. He reviews all the NPS data and customer feedback and fills in a spreadsheet, a PowerPoint and an agenda for the call, which is attended by the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Chief Operating Officer (COO) and his boss, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Jon gets stressed about this meeting and spends the whole day crafting his narratives and making sure the presentation looks perfect. As he works through the report, he realises he needs the help of some of his team members and pings one of them on Slack, the bank’s instant messaging platform. His direct report is working on a customer problem but he tells her to prioritise his request. It’s super important for ‘internal PR’ that this report is right, he explains. He fiddles and frets over the report into the night, worried that his superiors might grill him on the decline in sales last month.
On Wednesday, after a rubbish night’s sleep, Jon is already feeling the strain from a busy start to the week. He’s scheduled a few internal catch ups with some peers to check how they’re going. There’s nothing specific to discuss. The meetings are mostly friendly chitchat and as the meetings near their end Jon suggests some potential collaboration areas, but nothing concrete. This gives him the opportunity to arrange follow-up meetings. Never end a meeting without setting up a follow-up meeting is one of Jon’s mantras!
In the evening, Jon has his reporting call, shares the data and explains his strategic priorities for improving NPS. They’re not really priorities as he lists off several ideas quickly. Some ideas seem contradictory. Jon suggests they need a laser focus on first-time buyers. Later, he suggests that they’re not focusing enough on the property investment market, which is critical. His superiors struggle to follow his narrative. They spend most of their time questioning whether the data is right, as if the numbers will magically improve if they talk about them in detail. The meeting ends with a few stern motivational messages. The CFO tells Jon to buckle down and hit his numbers. His boss, the CMO, concludes with, yes and let us know how we can help. What that help might be is not specified. Jon is relieved to get through the call and hopes the numbers will improve by the time they meet again. It’s 9 pm by the time the meeting ends and his two boys have already gone to bed. He heads downstairs to eat a plate of food wrapped in tin foil in front of the TV with Sam.
On Thursday, Jon sets up a meeting to play back the feedback from the previous night’s meeting to his team. He hasn’t had time to condense his thoughts, so it’s an off-the-cuff hour’s run-through of almost everything that was said. Jon ends the meeting by setting up a further meeting on Friday to ‘brainstorm’ how they might improve home loan sales. He also decides to join an internal virtual workshop on risk and resilience, even though this doesn’t mean much to his role. While in this meeting, he flicks 50+ messages back and forth to his team on Slack. Two hours later he realises the workshop ended 30 minutes ago and he’s the only one still dialled into the virtual meeting. On Thursday nights, Jon sometimes meets a friend for a game of squash, but he doesn’t have the energy today and instead winds down with a few glasses of wine. He lets out a big sigh and tells himself, Almost there!
On Friday, Jon hosts a three-hour virtual brainstorm with his team. With no structure to the conversation, it quickly turns into an extended rant. The team share their frustrations regarding what they can’t do because of red tape in the business and lack of capacity in the marketing and technology teams. Jon scribbles a few things on his notepad. At the end of the meeting he thanks the team. ‘There’s plenty of food for thought here,’ he says. Jon rounds off the week by spending 90 minutes doing his timesheet. It takes him longer than usual as he needs to hunt down a code and get approval to register the time he spent in the internal risk workshop. Jon feels jaded after his week. When he gets home, he opens another bottle of wine and complains to Sam that he’s been flat out. He forgets to ask her how her week has been. After dinner, he takes his glass of wine and laptop into his study and answers a few more emails. He closes his laptop at 9 pm, already dreading the emails that will rack up over the weekend …
Jon spent the week in a busy trap. His job is to drive customer NPS and ultimately revenue, yet he didn’t interact with customers once, nor did he do anything directly for the bank’s customers. Plus, on several occasions he distracted his team away from working with customers. This story is all too common in many corporations.
Here’s the spoiler. You may think you’re nothing like Jon. You may have picked up this book in the hope it will give you some sort of validation that your boss is a busy idiot (and he/she might well be), but in all likelihood you too are a busy idiot — hopefully not all the time, but at least some of the time.
We waste too many hours of our lives being busy idiots. Over the past two decades Joff has worked across the UK, the US and Australia for small and mid-size digital agencies with 25 to 50 employees and at some of the largest management and tech consultancies in the world with over 500 000 employees. Busywork has been a fixture to some degree across all these organisations and geographies.
In a 2013 YouGov survey of over 1000 Brits conducted by the late anthropologist David Graeber, 37 per cent of respondents felt they had ‘a bullshit job’ (15 per cent weren’t sure). His definition of ‘a bullshit job’ was one that offers no value to the business or the person doing the job. Therefore, potentially as many as half of these British workers felt their job had no meaning. It’s hard to see how things have improved over the past decade; the modern corporate workplace is a breeding ground for busy idiots, and western societies champion busyness.
Did we take a wrong turn?
Imagine working in an office in the 1950s. You’d likely have a typewriter and a rotary phone (with a switchboard to connect calls), and your storage device was a filing cabinet and a Rolodex. Office news would be posted on a bulletin board. Letters were the primary mode of business communication and could take a week or more to be delivered. Work was manual and slow. Most workers worked 40 hours a week and overtime was uncommon. Today we exchange correspondence in real time over email. We have instant messaging platforms, the internet and AI tools to give us information instantaneously. So why are we all so goddamn busy?
As the technology has evolved we’ve got busier. The technology has given rise to an always-on culture (sometimes an expectation) and workers are suffering. A 2022 survey by McKinsey Health of 15 000 workers across 15 countries found that a quarter of employees experienced burnout symptoms. Many surveys put the number much higher. Qualtrics found that 79 per cent of workers across 26 countries felt ‘at or beyond workload capacity’ at the height of the pandemic in 2020. The other epidemic that’s not discussed is loneliness. In a Meta/Gallup study in October 2023 nearly one in four adults across the world reported feeling very or fairly lonely. Technology was supposed to make us more efficient and better connected, but we’re still working at least 40 hours a week on average and we’re lonelier than ever. Go figure.
Give me some good news …
The good news is there’s psychology and science behind why technology drives burnout and loneliness. By becoming aware of what happens to your brain when you spend your day pinging, swiping, texting and instant messaging, you can start to make adjustments and take back control. Sounds easy, right? Wrong! The tech industry utilises sophisticated persuasive design and artificial intelligence to actively hold your attention at work and at home. If you don’t understand these techniques (at least on a base level), you are liable to become a ‘lemming’ — that’s right, the 1991 hit game that took computer gaming by storm. Lemmings are green-haired, blue-robed little creatures that march in whatever direction their maker sees fit, even into oblivion (or off a cliff). Successful people avoid the busy traps of technology, and learn how to harvest technology and not let technology harvest them. We will show you how to do that in chapters 1 and 2 of this book.
What may feel out of your control is the way your organisation works, or more specifically the way your boss works. It can be torture to have a busy boss who flies by the seat of their pants and has ever-changing expectations and priorities. There are only two ways to solve this problem — meet it head-on or get out. Given that busywork is rife in most organisations, the latter is likely your plan B. It’s better to hone a system to get control of your work and your boss. In chapter 3, we introduce some tried and tested techniques with supporting real-life anecdotes. Be prepared: these stories may feel like an episode of The Office, but they’re all true.
Once you get a grip of your tech and your boss, you can start to make improvements to the way you work. Think of it as like adopting a healthy diet before you start hitting the gym. Joff’s good friend and former colleague Dr Andy Polaine calls busywork the junk food of work. Like junk food, it can be addictive, but it’s not good for you. And like any addiction, it needs constant discipline. Vicious cycles are much more seductive than virtuous ones. It takes discipline to ignore the lure of going into reactive, busy mode. Ultimately, your soul knows the difference between embracing meaningful work and cramming your day with as many micro-tasks and video calls as possible. In chapter 4, we’ll cover what happens to your brain when you engage in busywork and why human connection is so important to fight loneliness and burnout.
