The Hidden Cost of Busyness: The Case for White Space in your Calendar

In high-tempo environments like financial markets, busyness is often mistaken for effectiveness, but research shows that relentless activity erodes judgment, risk discipline, and strategic thinking – the very qualities that every markets professional needs! Those at the top of their game are not the individuals who work the most hours, but those who work the most effectively – and that means knowing when to pause and take space and time to think.  Martina Doherty discusses.

Returning to the office after Easter, most of us probably felt refreshed and ready to take on the start of Q2. Yet within hours, the inbox started filling up, the meetings resumed, and that clear-headed feeling soon dissolved. If that was you, then here’s a question: why does even a brief pause make such a positive difference, yet busyness reclaims us so quickly?

The Busyness Trap

In a culture that equates a full calendar with status, a quiet one can feel uncomfortable or raise questions – even at senior level – as though empty space needs to be justified. The evidence, however, tells a different story.

Research consistently shows that constant activity is a costly “productivity theatre” rather than a marker of impact.

• Deloitte’s 2025 Global Human Capital Trends Report found that leaders and employees spend 41% of their working day on tasks that generate no meaningful value, with executives attending significantly more meetings than the average employee.
• Asana reports that unproductive executive meeting time rose by 51% between 2019 and 2024.

This is not simply a time management problem. It is a normalised habit – one that is generally rewarded and, when modelled at the top, sets the pace for an entire organisation. It is no wonder that workplace burnout continues to rise.

High Tempo and Busyness Are Not The Same

The distinction between high tempo and constant activity is often lost – particularly in financial markets. There is no doubt that working in a markets environment is demanding, the tempo high, and the pressure to be responsive is real. I am not suggesting otherwise.

But high tempo is not the same as never stopping; intensity and relentlessness are not the same. The former is part of the job; the latter is a habit that actually depletes the cognitive resources most roles depend on – clear judgment, disciplined risk-taking, and strategic thinking. A trader who never steps back is not a better trader; over time, they are less so.

In a recent conversation with a senior executive at a US bank, they lamented the fact that their team had barely begun to realise the potential of AI – not through lack of capability, but because they simply had no time to experiment. “Business as usual is what gets rewarded and has to continue,” the executive noted. There is an irony: the very busyness that organisations reward is precisely what limits the strategic thinking and innovation they claim to seek.

The Elite Athlete Fallacy

Many financial organisations mirror elite sport in their culture and branding: using words like ‘power’, ‘pace’, ‘high-performance’ and ‘winning’ to describe their people and their environment. The successful elite athletes are also the archetype that individuals tend to equate with high-performance.

But this is a very limited view, focusing only on podium moments and wins. Elite athletes do not achieve excellence through relentless training. Free time, rest and recovery are part of their programme and key components of their success.

No high-performance coach would prescribe endless days of maximum-intensity work, yet many senior leaders impose precisely that regime on their most critical asset: their own minds.  Strategic insight, sound risk judgment, and creative problem-solving are not cultivated while in continuous motion. They emerge in the spaces between.

What is also often overlooked is that most elite athletes have relatively short careers – yet sustained high performance in the workplace is expected throughout an entire one.

The AI Paradox

Working ‘smarter, not harder’ has long been the ambition, and AI was going to help us achieve that – or so we thought.  But emerging evidence shows otherwise.

A recent UC Berkeley Haas School of Business study showed that rather than easing workload, AI has intensified it in three distinct ways:

1. Expanded scope: Employees now absorbing work that they had previously not performed.
2. Fewer natural pauses: Because AI makes tasks easier to start and sustain, it pushes work into moments that had previously served as mini-breaks such as lunch, pre-meeting preparation, and transitions between tasks. These natural stopping points have quietly disappeared.
3. Multitasking overload: Employees running AI processes in the background while drafting documents or attending meetings, keeping both humans and machines in continuous motion.

So what initially feels like a productivity gain quickly becomes a higher baseline, resulting in a denser, more cognitively demanding workday.

How to Own Your Schedule

The executives I work with, who operate most effectively, are those who actively manage their schedules. An exercise I often use is to ask them to track every commitment for two weeks and apply these questions to each one:

• Does this meeting or task require me specifically?
• Am I attending out of habit, hierarchy, or discomfort with delegation?

Consistently, 30-40% of their calendars cannot withstand that scrutiny. The mindset shift required for this transition is significant but also transformative: clear space in a calendar is not empty space; it is the raw material of effective leadership.         

Working Smarter – The Reality

AI is already intensifying the way we work, and it appears that pressure will only grow. Therefore, the leaders and market professionals who thrive over the next decade will be those who respond not by doing more, but by being more deliberate about what they do i.e. protecting space in their schedule for the thinking, judgment, and strategic clarity that their performance actually requires.

The pressure will always be there. The tempo will always be high. The challenge is not operating at pace – it is the ability to do so without sacrificing the clarity of thought that good decision-making needs.  The best people will know that and recognise that working smarter, not harder, was never just an aspiration – it’s a discipline.