When Busyness Became Worth

There is a kind of fatigue that hides behind achievement, a stillness no calendar can measure. Lately, I have noticed how easily exhaustion disguises itself as accomplishment. Every week I hear someone say they feel guilty for not being busy enough, even when their results spoke for themselves. Modern work has confused movement with meaning. Yet beneath that exhaustion lies a quiet opportunity. If we can learn to measure work by its impact rather than its volume, we might recover something we have misplaced, trust in our own judgment. The weight of workload, it seems, can be lifted not by working less, but by finally understanding what our work is worth.

The Cult of Measurement

Productivity once sat quietly in the back office, a ledger to help managers plan headcount and budgets. Now it stands in the lobby like a turnstile. Badges scan, keyboards log, calendars fill, and the system counts each trace like beads on a string.

Dashboards promise clarity, yet the count is not the work.

In many firms, especially in insurance and financial services where judgment used to be an artisan craft, the very visibility of effort has begun to impersonate impact. The shift has been amplified by hybrid work. Leaders struggle to see, so they watch what can be seen.

Yet even here lies potential. Measurement itself is neutral. The same tools that flatten nuance can, if recalibrated, illuminate hidden value. The question might be whether measurement has outgrown its original purpose, or whether we simply need to recalibrate what we count.