Always Busy? It Might Not Be the Work

Why is it that some people are busy no matter what role they’re in? It’s something I keep noticing. Some people are busy in every job they ever hold. Different organisations, different teams, different levels of seniority, and yet the same pattern shows up again and again. Always stretched. Always needed. Always flat out. At some point, it stops being about the job.

One of the most useful questions I’ve heard, originally posed by executive coach Jerry Colonna, is this: how are you complicit in creating the conditions you say you don’t want? It’s not a particularly comfortable question, but it is a revealing one. It removes the safety of “this is just how the role is” and turns the spotlight back onto behaviour, identity, and choice. Its also a useful lens to apply to drama as well. People who often say they don’t want drama in their lives, often do a marvellous job of creating it (but that’s another article…)

Some Busyness Is Real

Let’s be fair first. There are genuinely demanding roles where the workload far exceeds the resources. Too much scope, too few people, poor systems, constant urgency. Anyone who has been in senior leadership knows exactly what that feels like. In those cases, busyness is structural. If you added people, reduced scope, or changed priorities, the pressure would ease.

That’s worth pointing out, because otherwise people switch off and think this sounds nice in theory but doesn’t reflect reality. But this too is an important insight. Even when busyness is real, it still isn’t sustainable. Chronic overload produces the same outcomes every time. Decision fatigue creeps in. Judgment deteriorates. Work suffers. Health takes a hit. Relationships suffer. Eventually something gives. You always pay the price somewhere.

So even legitimate busyness is still a signal that something needs to change. It simply means the change might need to happen at a system or leadership level, not just a personal one.

When Busyness Becomes Identity

This is where things get more interesting. When someone remains relentlessly busy across roles, organisations, and seasons, the common denominator is no longer the job. It’s the person.

This is where busyness starts to intersect with significance, the basic human need to feel valuable, effective, and important. For some people, being busy isn’t just something they do. It’s how they know they matter.

Being needed feels good. Being relied on feels good. Being the one who fixes things feels good. Being indispensable feels very good. For leaders whose sense of value is tightly linked to usefulness, busyness becomes a reliable way of maintaining significance. It rarely happens as a conscious strategy. It develops gradually, reinforced by praise, reliance, and visibility, until it simply feels like “how I work.”

How Identity-Driven Busyness Shows Up

Over time, this kind of busyness starts to sound familiar. Leaders begin to narrate their workload in very specific ways, often without realising what sits underneath it.

You’ll hear things like:

• “If I don’t stay on top of this, it’ll fall over.”
• “I’m surrounded by people who don’t really know what they’re doing.”
•  “It’s just faster if I do it myself.”
• “No one else really understands this properly.”

On the surface, this kind of behaviour can look like commitment and accountability. Underneath, it is often identity protection.

One way this sometimes shows up, though not the only way, is in how leaders build and develop their teams. As an executive coach, one pattern I occasionally see is a leader who constantly has no one in their team who could genuinely step into their role if needed. That isn’t because talent doesn’t exist, but because it hasn’t been fully allowed, encouraged, or trusted to develop.

In some cases, consciously or unconsciously, leaders end up surrounding themselves with people who are more dependent, less confident, or less capable. Not because they want weak teams, but because having someone stronger than them, or even clearly equal to them, can quietly threaten something deeper.

If someone else could step into the role, a much more uncomfortable question can surface. If I’m replaceable, where does my value come from now? Ouch.

For leaders whose identity is closely tied to being needed, that question can feel surprisingly confronting. In those cases, busyness is maintained, delegation stays shallow, capability plateaus, and the leader remains central, exhausted, and essential.

And it rarely just affects the individual. Teams often feel it too, through constant urgency, reduced space to think, and an underlying sense that everything is important, all the time.

The Difference Between Real Demand and Self-Created Demand

This is where the distinction really matters. When busyness is genuinely job driven, people usually talk about it with a sense of frustration. They’ll say things like “this isn’t working,” “we need more resource,” or “this pace isn’t okay long term.”

When busyness is identity driven, it sounds different. “It’s just how I operate.” “I know I need to slow down, but I can’t drop the ball.” “It’s easier if I do it.”

But there is a giveaway. Even if the workload dropped by twenty percent, they wouldn’t slow down. The extra space would simply get filled. Queue more busyness…

When everything is treated as urgent and important, it becomes almost impossible to make meaningful choices about what actually matters.

If busyness were purely about demand, it would change with roles. When it doesn’t, it’s usually because work has become the primary source of self-worth, identity, and emotional regulation. Work becomes the place where value is proven and reinforced. The cost of slowing down is no longer just operational. It’s psychological. Rest threatens identity.

The Question Beneath the Question

So the real work isn’t “How do I get less busy?” It’s this: what does my busyness give me that I’m afraid to lose?

Status. Control. Relevance. Worth. A sense of being needed.

If you want to understand what’s really driving your busyness, these are useful places to start:

• If my workload dropped tomorrow, would I actually slow down?
• When I’m not needed, do I feel relieved or unsettled?
• Do I get my sense of value more from impact or from indispensability?
• What parts of my busyness are visible, and which parts do I quietly create?
• Who in my team could genuinely replace me, and how do I feel about that?

If those questions create discomfort, that’s usually a sign you’re looking in the right place.

A Final Thought

Some busyness is real. Some busyness is structural. And some busyness is doing emotional work we’ve never confronted.

 And of course, there is a fourth category, people who are always busy because they’re completely disorganised (but again - different article…)

 The goal here isn’t to care less, lead less, or contribute less. It’s to build a sense of significance that doesn’t depend on exhaustion, indispensability, or being permanently needed.

 Because the people who make the biggest impact over time are rarely the busiest ones. They’re the ones who can step back and still know exactly who they are.