The Busyness Paradox

There's a ritual of the modern workplace - one you've heard and most likely indulged in yourself.

It's the call and response we go through when you ask a workmate how they're doing: "Busy!" "So busy." "mentally busy."

It is pretty obviously a boast disguised as a complaint. And our simultaneously grim and half chuckled reply comes as a kind of congratulation: "Ha, better than the opposite." When did we start doing that?

As if he didn't have enough to do Oliver Burkeman explores this epidemic of busyness to reveal that it may not be what it at first seems.

Producer: Peter McManus

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2016.