Introduction
What/who is a Busy Idiot?

First, a confession. Joff’s guilty pleasure is watching Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. He can happily waste an entire evening watching chef Gordon Ramsay become increasingly exasperated with restaurant owners before he finally gets his way by simplifying the menu and painting the walls white instead of crimson. Ramsay has a unique talent for insults, and in one episode he utters the words, which still resonate with Joff 13 years after the show aired:

‘ … you’re a busy idiot.’

It was directed at a chef and it was anything but a compliment.

So what does it mean in the context of this book?

A Busy Idiot is like a hamster on a treadmill, running at breathtaking speed but going nowhere fast. They set up a meeting without an agenda and spend much of the meeting discussing what the agenda should be. So they set up another meeting, again with no agenda, and this goes on week after week. Busy Idiots are masters of multitasking; there’s nothing they can’t do … provided it takes less than 30 minutes. They have no time to focus on bigger, more important strategic projects. Their phone is like a gun in a holster ready to be drawn the instant they feel it vibrate. They respond to emails too at lightning speed. Their emails often contain open-ended questions, which lead to more emails. They change their minds constantly; what was important yesterday is forgotten the next day. Everything has to be done now, everything is urgent!

In meetings, they nod along enthusiastically but they’re not listening. In virtual meetings, they have several instant messaging conversations on the go. They love the pace and the dopamine kick from getting work done! Except work is never done. The busy idiot works longer and longer hours. Their calendar looks like a maniacal game of Tetris, with the sound on full blast. The business results don’t follow and team attrition is high. Business leaders sometimes defend the busy idiot and point to their long hours and hard work, but the reality is that a busy idiot is just busy being busy.

Here, admittedly with more than a dash of hyperbole, is what a week in the life of a Busy Idiot might look like in a modern workplace. We sincerely hope this story doesn’t feel too familiar to you.

Busy Idiot Jon

Jon works as a Customer Experience (CX) manager at a leading UK bank. It’s his job to monitor customer feedback and sentiment and identify ways to improve the bank’s net promoter score (NPS). His key performance indicator (KPI) is improving revenue growth by selling more home loans. Jon lives with his wife Sam, who also works fulltime, and their two young boys aged nine and eleven.

Jon starts Monday morning with no clear picture of what he’s going to do or achieve. Instead, he dives into his inbox and works through the 50 emails he’s received over the weekend. They’re mostly internal, and it’s lunchtime before he’s answered them all. After lunch Jon dials into his series of diarised 1v1s with his team of four. The conversations are unstructured and informal. They’re supposed to last 30 minutes but often go on longer. Jon does most of the talking, thinking out loud about some of the challenges the bank is facing. He rarely asks for his team members’ ideas. At the end of each call he typically dishes out some half-baked actions. His team have learned to ignore these actions, as Jon usually forgets what he’s asked them to do by the following week. Jon does this every Monday. In the evening, through dinner with his family, he sits at the end of the table scrolling his phone and answering emails.

On Tuesday, Jon prepares for the internal reporting call with his superiors that happens every Wednesday fortnight. He reviews all the NPS data and customer feedback and fills in a spreadsheet, a PowerPoint and an agenda for the call, which is attended by the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Chief Operating Officer (COO) and his boss, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Jon gets stressed about this meeting and spends the whole day crafting his narratives and making sure the presentation looks perfect. As he works through the report, he realises he needs the help of some of his team members and pings one of them on Slack, the bank’s instant messaging platform. His direct report is working on a customer problem but he tells her to prioritise his request. It’s super important for ‘internal PR’ that this report is right, he explains. He fiddles and frets over the report into the night, worried that his superiors might grill him on the decline in sales last month.

On Wednesday, after a rubbish night’s sleep, Jon is already feeling the strain from a busy start to the week. He’s scheduled a few internal catch ups with some peers to check how they’re going. There’s nothing specific to discuss. The meetings are mostly friendly chitchat and as the meetings near their end Jon suggests some potential collaboration areas, but nothing concrete. This gives him the opportunity to arrange follow-up meetings. Never end a meeting without setting up a follow-up meeting is one of Jon’s mantras!

In the evening, Jon has his reporting call, shares the data and explains his strategic priorities for improving NPS. They’re not really priorities as he lists off several ideas quickly. Some ideas seem contradictory. Jon suggests they need a laser focus on first-time buyers. Later, he suggests that they’re not focusing enough on the property investment market, which is critical. His superiors struggle to follow his narrative. They spend most of their time questioning whether the data is right, as if the numbers will magically improve if they talk about them in detail. The meeting ends with a few stern motivational messages. The CFO tells Jon to buckle down and hit his numbers. His boss, the CMO, concludes with, yes and let us know how we can help. What that help might be is not specified. Jon is relieved to get through the call and hopes the numbers will improve by the time they meet again. It’s 9 pm by the time the meeting ends and his two boys have already gone to bed. He heads downstairs to eat a plate of food wrapped in tin foil in front of the TV with Sam.

On Thursday, Jon sets up a meeting to play back the feedback from the previous night’s meeting to his team. He hasn’t had time to condense his thoughts, so it’s an off-the-cuff hour’s run-through of almost everything that was said. Jon ends the meeting by setting up a further meeting on Friday to ‘brainstorm’ how they might improve home loan sales. He also decides to join an internal virtual workshop on risk and resilience, even though this doesn’t mean much to his role. While in this meeting, he flicks 50+ messages back and forth to his team on Slack. Two hours later he realises the workshop ended 30 minutes ago and he’s the only one still dialled into the virtual meeting. On Thursday nights, Jon sometimes meets a friend for a game of squash, but he doesn’t have the energy today and instead winds down with a few glasses of wine. He lets out a big sigh and tells himself, Almost there!

On Friday, Jon hosts a three-hour virtual brainstorm with his team. With no structure to the conversation, it quickly turns into an extended rant. The team share their frustrations regarding what they can’t do because of red tape in the business and lack of capacity in the marketing and technology teams. Jon scribbles a few things on his notepad. At the end of the meeting he thanks the team. ‘There’s plenty of food for thought here,’ he says. Jon rounds off the week by spending 90 minutes doing his timesheet. It takes him longer than usual as he needs to hunt down a code and get approval to register the time he spent in the internal risk workshop. Jon feels jaded after his week. When he gets home, he opens another bottle of wine and complains to Sam that he’s been flat out. He forgets to ask her how her week has been. After dinner, he takes his glass of wine and laptop into his study and answers a few more emails. He closes his laptop at 9 pm, already dreading the emails that will rack up over the weekend …

Jon spent the week in a busy trap. His job is to drive customer NPS and ultimately revenue, yet he didn’t interact with customers once, nor did he do anything directly for the bank’s customers. Plus, on several occasions he distracted his team away from working with customers. This story is all too common in many corporations.

Here’s the spoiler. You may think you’re nothing like Jon. You may have picked up this book in the hope it will give you some sort of validation that your boss is a busy idiot (and he/she might well be), but in all likelihood you too are a busy idiot — hopefully not all the time, but at least some of the time.

We waste too many hours of our lives being busy idiots. Over the past two decades Joff has worked across the UK, the US and Australia for small and mid-size digital agencies with 25 to 50 employees and at some of the largest management and tech consultancies in the world with over 500 000 employees. Busywork has been a fixture to some degree across all these organisations and geographies.

In a 2013 YouGov survey of over 1000 Brits conducted by the late anthropologist David Graeber, 37 per cent of respondents felt they had ‘a bullshit job’ (15 per cent weren’t sure)....