TL;DR: Everyone is still slammed, though we work far fewer hours than our great-great-grandparents, and AI now turns out a first draft in minutes. Busyness is a choice, and a rewarded one: a full calendar makes its owner look scarce and in demand, no matter what got finished. The hours AI saves go straight back into other work, plus new work nobody owns. The exchange rate is cultural: Americans reward the overloaded week, Italians mark it down. My own model of a fully loaded leader's week leaves two days open. Check next week against your prioritized list and what an agent could do; empty one recurring block.
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There are only twenty-eight hours in a day, and your calendar has found a use for every one. "Slammed." "Let me find you something in three weeks," offered as an apology and received as a boast. Nobody gives busyness up, because it is still the most respectable way to say that you matter.
The list behind it is real: three top priorities, eight key deliverables, fifteen standing responsibilities, then whatever the week brings, inside normal hours. Even the word works against you. For most of its life in English, priority meant simply going first. The sense that comes in plurals is less than a century old. Hand a team more than two dozen of them, and you have handed them none. What works is a prioritized list, which is less inspiring and far more useful.
AI was supposed to end this. It made producing work cheap and left hours and judgment as scarce as ever, so the list of defensible yeses grew and the week stayed seven days long. Some AI-assisted tasks now take longer than before: the draft shrinks to minutes, and checking its sources eats that time and more.
Busyness, then, is a sensible answer to an impossible list. The hours the tool saved went straight back into other work. The tool also manufactures work of its own (integrating it, checking it) that is nobody's job and lands even on colleagues who never adopted it. Call that a transition cost. Transitions end; the habit of spending every recovered hour has outlived every one so far.
It pays, too. A full calendar makes its owner look scarce and in demand, whatever got finished, so advice to be less busy keeps failing on people who agree with it. The exchange rate is cultural. In one study, Americans rewarded the overloaded week, and Italians marked it down; leisure was the stronger credential there. On your next transatlantic leadership call, one side may be reading the other's availability as character.
Anyone who blames the hours has a problem. They fell by about half over the last hundred and fifty years, and an economist writing between the wars expected us to be bored by now. Part of that decline is people starting work later and retiring earlier. I could find no measure of the load a knowledge worker carries in their head.
I should declare an interest. More than three years ago I gave a talk on exactly this, tips included: shorten meetings to twenty-five minutes, which is five minutes shaved off a structural problem. My own calendar had other plans. Meetings that could have been an email still got accepted. A global team meant I adjusted to their time zones, never the other way around. Travel meant rebuilding the week around delays on connecting flights, or on airplanes where video calls still don't work (long may that last). The talk assumed eight direct reports. At one point I had fifteen, each with a weekly one-on-one.
Yet one slide in that talk is the evidence against me: a model week with eight direct reports, weekly one-on-ones, skip-levels, customer time, two deep-work blocks, email twice a day, all on one calendar, and two days left open. Seven more one-on-ones at twenty-five minutes take about three hours out of them. You have the time. You do not take it. Open doors buy information; closed ones buy capacity, and a calendar that never closes one has made its choice.
Busyness, you have never missed a meeting.
You arrived with the factory whistle and stayed for the reply-all.
We bought the machines and halved the hours,
and every hour that came back, we handed to you.
Now the machines write our drafts,
and the afternoons they save are already yours.
We complain about you to anyone who will listen,
mostly so they know how much we are needed.
So run next week's calendar twice: once against your prioritized list, once against how much an agent could do. A week an agent could largely absorb describes a misallocated leader; overworked is the flattering word. Then delete or delegate one recurring block on the calendar, whether it's yours or a direct report's. Hold it empty for a month. Hand the second pass to your AI, with instructions to keep its opinions to itself.
A calendar is a confession, written in twenty-five-minute blocks, and the only hand on the pen is yours.
All the images were generated with AI (ChatGPT Images, Gemini Nano Banana, Claude Opus) by Gérard Métrailler.
Food for your AI
For the second pass, paste next week's calendar under this, or skip the paste if your AI can already read your calendar.
Look at my calendar for next week (pasted below, or read it directly). For each entry, say whether an AI agent could do most of the work behind it, and name the part that still needs me. Then list what remains: the entries that need my judgment, my presence, or my relationships, with the total time they take.
Do not recommend what to cut, delegate, or move, and do not propose a better week. The choice is mine. Your job is to show me what I am currently choosing.
[paste calendar here, or delete this line]
Sources
Bellezza, Silvia, Neeru Paharia, and Anat Keinan. "Conspicuous Consumption of Time: When Busyness and Lack of Leisure Time Become a Status Symbol." Journal of Consumer Research 44, no. 1 (June 2017): 118-138. https://academic.oup.com/jcr/article-abstract/44/1/118/2736404. Accessed 2026-09-26.
Giattino, Charlie, and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina. "Are we working more than ever?" Our World in Data, December 16, 2020. https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever. Accessed 2026-09-26.
Humlum, Anders, and Emilie Vestergaard. "Large Language Models, Small Labor Market Effects." Becker Friedman Institute for Economics Working Paper 2025-56, April 15, 2025. https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/BFI_WP_2025-56-1.pdf. Accessed 2026-09-26.
Keynes, John Maynard. "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren." The Nation and Athenæum, October 11 and 18, 1930; collected in Essays in Persuasion. https://www.economicsnetwork.ac.uk/archive/keynes_persuasion/Economic_Possibilities_for_our_Grandchildren.htm.
O'Conner, Patricia T., and Stewart Kellerman. "Priority: the highs and the lows." The Grammarphobia Blog, September 19, 2016. https://grammarphobia.com/blog/2016/09/priority.html. Accessed 2026-09-26.
Olsson, Caroline Falkman, Yafah Edelman, and Amreeta Das. "One in five US workers now delegates tasks to AI instead of other humans." Epoch AI, August 6, 2026. https://epoch.ai/publications/one-in-five-workers-delegate-work-to-ai. Accessed 2026-09-26.
