This is still early days for this. I’m in the middle of editing, I’m trying out a new way of writing essays with AI rather than doing it all solo, or all AI. There’s a LOT to do here, but we’re getting there.

We are busy in order to have leisure. — Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

A scenario:

A senior person is handed a difficult idea. They read the first page, skim the rest, and conclude that the thinking is muddled and the writing unclear, so its author should go away and make it clearer and simpler.

Sometimes that is the case, but often what is missing is not clarity in the document but attention in the reader, who has none to spare. One encounter cannot tell you which failed, the idea or the attention, but, over time, a distribution can. An idea that draws the same objection from many readers is probably the idea’s fault; one that only some readers cannot take might well be down to the reader. The manner of the pushback is telling too: a reader with attention to spare, who thinks the idea needs work, will say where and how; the depleted reader has just enough left to ask for it to be shorter.

Let’s call it manufactured incompetence, at least until a better phrase turns up. A capable person, in a role that exists for the exercise of judgement, is made unable to exercise it by the demands of the role. They then interpret that inability as a fault in the author of the idea rather than a condition of their own working life and the social structure that creates it. The environment rewards the appearance of seriousness, the full day and the fast reply, over the slower thing that seriousness is meant to protect.

It is tempting to reach for the Peter Principle¹, which describes a ceiling: you rise until you reach a job you cannot do, and there you stall. That doesn’t quite fit, I am describing a person of ample ability, in conditions that stop that ability from being expressed. If given a free week and a hard problem, that person would be formidable. The scarce resource is uninterrupted attention, not talent, and we have drifted into an arrangement in which the most senior people are the least able to access that resource.

The world is full of difficult issues, and there’s an important role for specialists in clarifying information to provide to decision makers. However there are a lot of complex issues in the world that genuinely do require deep engagement to work out a good response. The popularity of the you can fix climate change if you just plant 1 trillion trees² paper is a good example of this. The science since has pointed out that it’s much more nuanced, and that merely planting a lot of trees can be quite a bad idea in some situations, but there is a huge appeal of a simple answer.

“everything should be as simple as it can be but not simpler” Einstein³

How it is built

The people this happens to were, as a rule, excellent at something else first. They were promoted for being good at that, into a discipline nobody taught them. The Chartered Management Institute (2023) found that 82% of people entering management had received no formal management or leadership training, and 26% of senior managers and leaders had received none either.⁴ They label these as “accidental managers”. Most organisations run a single ladder: to pay someone more, or to keep them, you make them a manager, whether or not managing is something they can do or want to do.

The result is a stranding; the craft that earned the promotion moves on without them, practised now by people who still have the hours on the tools to keep up, while the craft they have now been handed was never taught to them and cannot be learned in the gaps between meetings. They sit between two competences, fluent in neither. I suspect that, in the current work climate, even if they were trained explicitly, there wouldn’t be any mention of how to engage with complex issues that can’t be thought through in a 10 slide deck.

Why the anxiety comes out as busyness

The pressure to look busy is, for most people, not vanity. It is imposed externally: a calendar filled by other people, a manager who reads a quiet hour as spare capacity, a working culture in which “you’re not paid to think” can still be said with a straight face. Performance of busyness is real, but it is the smaller part. The larger part is imposed, and the imposition rests on an old assumption, that thinking is not work, that the real work is production, and that an hour not visibly producing is an hour going spare. Newport (2024) calls this pseudo-productivity: because the output of knowledge work is hard to measure, visible activity stands in for it, as the thing that can be seen.⁵

There is a long genealogy to why we treat visible labour as virtue. Weber (1905/2001) traced the modern version to Calvinism and the doctrine of election, the belief that God has already chosen who will be saved and that no human act can move the verdict⁶. The uncertainty this produced was unbearable, so believers searched their lives for signs that they were among the elect, and steady worldly diligence became, not the cause of salvation but its evidence. Idleness, by the same logic, was damning. “Waste of time,” Weber wrote, “is the first and in principle the deadliest of sins.” The theology ebbed away and the reflex stayed. We still treat the empty hour as guilty until it proves itself productive.

Once work carries moral weight, busyness can be shown off. Bellezza, Paharia and Keinan (2017) documented the modern convention: the overbooked, never-off professional is read as important, on the inference that a person genuinely in demand would have no time to spare⁷. Veblen had described the opposite convention a century earlier, when the wealthy signalled rank by conspicuous abstention from work, his leisure class being people who did not have to earn a living at all (Veblen, 1899). As the leisure class has essentially disappeared, the professional, who does have to earn, now advertises worth through the full calendar rather than the empty one.

Traditionally the bottleneck has been caused by production. All the writing and coding and cutting and pasting has taken up weeks of effort, so for most people there’s been plenty of interstitial time for thinking about what they’re doing. As AI tools are more integrated into our work, the production is becoming a more trivial part of the process, the opportunities for thought are being squeezed. I once had a job where I drilled holes all day, and I did a lot of thinking while I was doing that. But now I am often working on two or more codebases at the same time in parallel AI chat sessions, my opportunities for accidental abstract thinking have been reduced almost to zero, and if I want to retain the benefits of that, I need to make those thinking opportunities an explicit part of my life.

The traditional assumption is that production is the expensive part, and thinking happens incidentally. As the making is handed to machines, the logic inverts. Deciding what is worth making and judging whether the made thing is any good, is the work that remains, and both are kinds of thinking. We are automating production at speed while still running an attention economy built for a world in which production was the bottleneck. Herbert Simon (1971) noted that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention⁸. Attention is finite, it is the input the senior role actually runs on, and the busyness regime spends it on being seen to spend it. [these last two paras need to be fixed up, I added the first, and haven’t fully resolved it with the second]

The two tiers separate here. For most people the constraint is external: the time is not theirs to protect, and the demand to look occupied comes down the hierarchy. At the top it turns inward, though rarely on purpose. A senior leader could clear the calendar and think. What stops them is not a manager enforcing it but an audience they cannot ignore, a board, a market, a set of peers who read reserved capacity as underuse or as risk. To take the unhurried time the work needs, they would first have to win an argument with people who have no vocabulary for legible thinking. They do not lose that argument. They never have it, because it does not occur to them that it is theirs to start.

The maker who forgot they were a maker

Graham (2009) drew the useful distinction between the maker’s schedule and the manager’s⁹. Makers needs long unbroken stretches; a single meeting dropped in after lunch splits the day into two pieces too small to build anything in. Managers live in interchangeable hourly boxes and cannot see the problem. Graham’s own fix was to bolt his meetings to the end of the day and keep the mornings whole.

< roughly edited as far as here >

At least in the world I interact with, there are very few pure managers, the layers of management that were there purely for upward information-distillation seem to be gone. Graham sorts people into makers and managers, but realistically they’re more opposing mindsets than distinct groups.¹⁰ Everyone makes things, everyone who devises “courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” (Simon, 1969) is designing. It might be worth thinking about leaders as makers of choices. The mind behind a material artifact is doing the same processes that the mind behind a sales plan or a social policy is doing. A strategy document, a contract, a restructure strategy, a fee model, a decision about who sits next to whom: all of these are designed, and designing them well is challenging. The more useful cut runs not between maker-people and manager-people but between two modes the same person moves through. There is maker-mode, in which a thing is held long enough to be shaped, and manager-mode, in which inputs are received, sorted, and passed on.

What the leader has lost is not the capacity to make. It is the recognition that their own highest-value output is a made thing, with a maker’s requirements. They have been alienated from the craft nature of their own work.¹¹ Judgement, synthesis, the ability to stay inside a hard problem until it yields: these are not the overhead around the real job, they are the job. Treated as overhead, they get the scraps of attention left once the calendar has taken its cut, and the scraps are not enough. When a difficult idea then arrives and will not go in, the natural move for someone who no longer believes thinking is work is to conclude that the idea, not the depleted attention receiving it, is at fault. The cost of switching is real and it compounds. Leroy (2009) showed that when we move between tasks a residue of the last one lingers and drags on the next, so a day chopped into fragments is not a day of many small productivities but a day spent mostly in the smear between them.¹² [this para feels like we’re getting a bit lost. We’re talking too much about being a maker, and not enough about being a judge. The maker angle is great, and I think we should keep it but it’s disappearing down its own rabbit hole. the core of this argument is really about attention, and having what you need to be able to bring the force of that attention to bear on a problem. The following section on leisure needs to stay attached to that core idea, so it doesn’t just get too excited about leisure as a good in itself, or distracted down a deep-work rabbit hole, etc.]

What leisure was for

The Greek is scholē (the origin of our “school”)¹³ did not mean rest or amusement, it meant freedom from the pressure of necessity, the condition under which the highest activity, contemplation, became possible. Aristotle’s (ca. 350 B.C.E./2009) formula is that we are busy in order to be at leisure, not the reverse; work is for the sake of scholē, and to invert that is to mistake the means for the end. One concession before leaning further on him: the leisure Aristotle prized was for contemplation pursued as an end in itself, not for getting through a strategy paper faster. I borrow scholē for its shape, freedom from the pressure of necessity, and for its etymology, not to smuggle in a claim that leaders need philosophy. It is the shape the modern worker has lost, and it will hold deep reading, incubation or hard judgement equally well. The Latin word for leisure was otium, and their word for business, for the state of not being at leisure, was negotium, which is simply nec-otium, the negation of leisure. Business was defined, in the language itself, as the absence of the condition in which thought happens.

One thing to bear in mind is that Athenian leisure rested on people who had none, on enslaved workers and on women whose labour was not counted. Scholē was an unacknowledged class privilege before it was a philosophical ideal, and any argument that reaches for it has to sit with that.¹⁴ What makes the idea worth keeping is that the Greeks were right about what leisure was for even while being wrong about who deserved it. The uncomfortable question is not whether contemplative freedom is worth having but who gets to have it, and at whose expense.

Pieper (1948/1998) carried the idea into the twentieth century and named its enemy exactly. His argument in Leisure: The Basis of Culture is that leisure is not the reward that follows work but the precondition of any work worth doing, a stance of receptive openness in which real insight can arrive, and that a culture of “total work,” which grants legitimacy to nothing that is not visibly labour, corrodes the very faculty that thought depends on.¹⁵ Set against the senior leader who cannot afford to be seen doing nothing, Pieper is not quaint. He is describing the exact organ that manufactured incompetence removes.

The disciplines that kept a theory of this survived better. Mathematics and physics prize hard grinding, and they also honour the person lying on a sofa staring at the ceiling, because they have never confused the second with idleness. Wallas, a co-founder of the London School of Economics, set out the stages of creative thought a century ago, and the load-bearing one is incubation, the interval in which you deliberately stop working on a problem so the mind can work on it without you (Wallas, 1926).¹⁶ He drew it partly from Poincaré’s account of a solution to an abandoned problem arriving as he stepped onto a bus with his mind entirely elsewhere (Poincaré, 1908/1952). These fields have a doctrine that sanctions the empty afternoon. They can point to it and say that this is a stage of the work, not a lapse from it.

The creative professions have no such doctrine, and the reason is legibility rather than temperament. A proof either checks or it does not, so mathematics can be indifferent to how you reached it; the result vouches for the process after the fact. Design output cannot vouch for itself the same way. It is satisficing, in Simon’s sense, a good-enough choice pulled from a solution space far too large to search to the end, and nobody can show that this plan is the best plan, because the search that would prove it never terminates. Into that gap steps process as evidence: unable to prove the output is good, you prove instead that you worked hard for it, and hard work means visible hours. Architecture then adds a myth of its own, the heroic gesture, the master’s sketch thrown down whole on a napkin, which worships the instantaneous flash and so credits neither the long grind nor the slow incubation. The field ends with the worst of both cultures. It will not count thinking as work, and it will not count patience as thinking.

What it costs, and to whom

There is an economics to this that is more than metaphor. Cyert and March named organisational slack decades ago and argued that it is not waste but reserve, the spare resource that lets a firm absorb a shock or pursue something new instead of merely surviving the day (Cyert & March, 1963).¹⁷ DeMarco put it more sharply, borrowing from queueing theory: as any system nears full utilisation its ability to respond does not fall away gently, it collapses, because a queue at a hundred percent has nowhere to put the next arrival (DeMarco, 2001).¹⁸ An organisation that runs its people at total capacity has optimised away the very thing that lets it think and adapt, and has done so while congratulating itself on efficiency.

The name for the loss is X-inefficiency. Leibenstein coined it for firms that produce less than their inputs allow, not by misallocating resources in the textbook sense but through slack inside the organisation, effort withheld, attention misspent (Leibenstein, 1966).¹⁹ Usually the word slack is an accusation, and there is a tension worth naming rather than smoothing over: Leibenstein’s slack is the disease, and I am about to call a kind of slack the cure. They are two different things wearing one word. Idle effort is waste. Reserved attention, held so that thought and response stay possible, is not. A regime that stamps out every visible gap removes both, and in removing the second it lowers the output it set out to raise. Running people at full tilt does not maximise what they produce. It maximises what they produce that can be seen.

That the loss is real and measurable is no longer arguable. The World Management Survey, run by Bloom and Van Reenen across tens of thousands of firms, found that management practice is strongly tied to productivity, profitability and survival, that badly managed firms form a long persistent tail, and, in the largest study, that management practices account for more than a fifth of the variation in productivity between plants, a share comparable to or larger than research spending, technology or workforce skill (Bloom & Van Reenen, 2007, 2010; Bloom et al., 2019).²⁰ Management is not the soft residue left over once the real inputs are counted. It is one of the real inputs, and how a leader spends their attention is much of what the word means.

If firms routinely produce below their potential, then society gets less than it could from the same people, materials and time, and the shortfall is real output that never came into being. I am inclined to go one street further and say that because the state supplies so many of the inputs, the educated people, the infrastructure, the stable institutions, a chronically under-producing private sector returns less to the state than it received, which shows up as a tax burden heavier than it needed to be and private exchanges thinner than they might have been, a slow leak in the collective account.²¹ That last step is mine, and I hold it more loosely than the rest; the economics I can cite stops at the firm. The firm-level claim alone is enough to make the point uncomfortable. The leader who cannot find an hour to think is not indulging a private vice. They are a small recurring loss in a very large ledger.

I keep returning to a detail from my own trade. We do not, for the most part, bill clients by the hour. We agree a fee for a phase of work and live with the difference between that fee and what the work actually costs us; the timesheets we keep are internal. On paper this is outcome pricing, and it ought to free us from the tyranny of the billable minute. It does not, quite, and I have started to suspect why. Under a fixed fee, an hour spent thinking rather than producing is not merely unbillable, which would make it invisible. It is worse than invisible, because it is a direct subtraction from the margin on a pot that cannot grow. The rational response to a capped fee is to compress the hours, and the hours easiest to compress are the quiet ones with nothing to show. So the instrument meant to buy us freedom to think may be the one most efficiently taxing the thinking away. I do not know that this is true. I know it is the shape of the thing I feel.

There is a version of this that ends well. We are building machines to do the producing, and if the old excuse for filling every hour was that the hour could be spent making something, that excuse is dissolving. The freed capacity could go to the thing the making was always meant to serve, deciding what is worth doing and thinking hard about whether we are doing it. It could equally be swallowed whole and poured back into doing more, faster, because the reflex that reads an empty hour as waste will not retire simply because the work has changed. The Greeks bought their leisure with other people’s unfreedom. We may be about to buy ours with machines, and the open question is whether we will have kept the faculty to use it, or whether we will only have found new hours to fill.

We have built work that depends, at its most valuable, on unhurried attention, and then arranged our institutions so that unhurried attention is the one thing a serious person may not be seen to take. The senior person skimming the difficult idea is not failing at the job. They are succeeding at the job we actually set, which is to appear fully occupied at all times, and that success is what makes the other job, the real one, impossible. Negotium was the negation of leisure. We have built a whole economy of it and called the negation the work.

Notes

References

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