It's not busyness but bandwidth

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Oliver Burkeman asks if our problem with busyness is not that we do not have the time but rather we literally do not have the head space. 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? Producer: Peter McManus First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2016.