Dubai Diaries: Why are we obsessed with appearing busy?

Last week, I called a friend bang in the middle of the day to invite her over for dinner on Diwali. Since my husband is travelling and I did not want to spend festive evening alone, I thought we could catch up over food and conversations. However, the moment she took the call, she began whispering, giving me a sense that the doomsday was near. “Hi, yes, tell me fast,” she said. “Are you busy? I can call later,” I suggested.

“Of course not. I am done with the work, but boss is hovering around. So need to pretend to look busy,” she said. Pretend! Really?!? Why would professionals who know their job, and tend to finish it on time go to extreme lengths to ‘pretend’ to be busy? As the friend finally came over on the eve of Diwali, she rationalised that things aren’t quite black and white in the corporate world.

If you look happy, relaxed and chilled out, it is assumed that you do not have enough work, and possibly are not worthy of the designation and remuneration earned at the end of the month. She went on to cite examples of seniors who do not really do much but have mastered the fine art of looking just about busy enough to give the impression that heaven is falling on earth each day, and they’re saving the rest of us from it by slogging it out.

All this while the fifth or sixth round of solitaire is being played on another window, neatly hidden from others’ gaze. These are also the people, she said, who tend to speak the loudest on a public platform to assert something very simple or inconsequential only to reassure themselves and others that they are on top of everything.

Needless to say, it is an exercise in futility because appearing to be busy has never really helped an organisation become a Fortune 100 company. Then why do so many employees feel the need to give an impression that they are almost always preoccupied?

Certain corporate cultures foster an environment where employees are expected to be on top of their toes all the time. It’s a marker of hard work. When you do a job for a considerable period of time, you develop an easier relationship with it. For example, if at the beginning of your career, you took four hours to finish a presentation, chances are that five years later, you’ll only take two.

The experience you have accumulated is helping your company save those two hours for you to be invested in something else which might not be a very, very important task but is something that’s going to add value later on. But the obsession with looking busy only means you pretend to deliver more than you actually should. Over a period of time, it also becomes a habit.

Navigating corporate culture is not as easy as self-help books have us believe. But when you are in what organisational psychologist Adam Smith calls a psychologically safe workplace, you feel less anxious about finishing your work on, or ahead of, time and spend it judiciously for professional growth — reading something related to work, or going through market research, or networking. That utopia is well worth fighting for.

• Dubai