I am supposed to be planning the next Oops to Opportunity event right now.
Instead, I spent a couple of hours yesterday reorganizing my workspace. I color coded my calendar, cleared out old emails, unsubscribed from a few too and finally moved a bunch of stray files into nicely labeled folders. When I finished, my screen looked serene. I closed my laptop and felt a deep, satisfying sense of accomplishment.
It wasn't until I woke up this morning that the quiet panic set in. I realised I hadn't done anything to move the event forward even by a single inch.
I used to think this was just a bad habit, a simple lack of focus. But I think the deeper truth is this: “easy busy” protects our identity. It is fear, disguised as efficiency.
I see this happen all the time, not just with myself, but with sales teams. You will see someone spend hours on LinkedIn, meticulously finding email addresses, crafting the perfect cold messages, and building massive spreadsheets of prospects. It looks incredibly efficient. It feels like real, tangible work. But the moment it’s time to actually pick up the phone and make a call? Suddenly, there are a dozen other "urgent" administrative tasks that absolutely must take precedence.
We do it because sending a cold email is safe. If no one replies, it’s just a silent, invisible rejection. But picking up the phone means you might stutter. You might get hung up on. You might hear the word "no" out loud, in real-time.
It’s the exact same reason I am cleaning my inbox instead of writing the concept note and proposal for my own event. Putting the event together is vulnerable. The proposal might be rejected. The event might flop. The hard work is entirely unpredictable and full of risk.
But cleaning an inbox never will be. You can’t fail at reorganizing a folder or building a spreadsheet.
Notice what all "easy busy" tasks have in common. They are finite. They are predictable. They are immediately rewarding and completely controllable. We retreat into tasks that guarantee completion because it makes us feel safe. It isn't laziness. It is emotional self-protection.
But there is another layer to this, one that is silently enforced by the culture we work in.
We all like the feeling of a full calendar and a massive to-do list, because modern work culture treats the appearance of busyness as a proxy for value. If you look busy, you are working hard. If you aren't, it’s a red flag.
So, we step onto the stage. We aren't actually being productive; we are performing productivity.
Think about it. Imagine nobody is around. No Slack. No Teams. No Outlook. No little green dot next to your name indicating you are online. No manager to walk past your desk.
Would you still answer those unimportant emails first?
I probably wouldn’t.
Then who are you doing it for?
We fill our days with mundane work because it gives us a false sense of momentum, just like doom scrolling gives us a false sense of connection. We are perfectly mesmerized by the sheer volume of things we are touching without ever actually moving the needle.
The truth here isn't about finding a better time-management hack or a new app. It is about recognizing the performance for what it is, and maybe stepping off the stage for a bit.
The next time you catch yourself obsessing over the font size on a document no one will see, or color-coding a calendar to avoid making a difficult phone call, try to stop and ask yourself a simple question:
What is the hard thing I am currently hiding from?