Do Busy Right - The Task and Attention Management Podcast · Larry Tribble, Ph.D.

Not As Busy As We Think (Maybe) - DBR 086

June 28, 2025·50 min·2 clips

If you can get the same output in 32 hours that you got in 40 hours, your productivity actually went up.

The episode opens with a plain idea: productivity is hard to measure, and that can leave people thinking they are doing fine when there is still plenty of room to improve. That tension comes back again and again. A person can stay busy, stay occupied, and still miss the gap between looking effective and being effective. From there, the episode gets more specific. It lays out three broad wastes, which it treats as interruption, multitasking, and distraction, and it sorts them by where they come from and how much control a person usually has over them. Interruption comes first. It is framed as an outside call on attention, the kind that can arrive through people, routines, coffee breaks, and the small permissions that let a day split apart. Multitasking comes next. The episode pushes back on the idea that humans really multitask, even if the urge to juggle work is common and sometimes encouraged by the systems around them. Distraction is harder. It is described as an internal call on attention, with the brain raising its hand through unfinished thoughts and open loops. The answer, in this view, is to get those thoughts out of the skull and into a system. Once they are written down or organized somewhere trustworthy, they lose some of their force. The episode leans on that point more than once. It suggests that outside structure can weaken distraction over time, and that the effect can be larger than people expect once the habit settles in. The tone stays calm and corrective. It does not treat busyness as a virtue or a moral score, but as a sign that attention may be leaking through habits that can be examined and improved. The episode closes by linking better attention to less clock time and better follow-through. The larger claim is that more effective work does not need more exhaustion; it needs a cleaner place for attention to land.

As heard by us

Productivity is framed as a measurement problem, with waste split into interruption, multitasking, and distraction.

The discussion makes a plain point and keeps coming back to it: productivity is hard to measure, and that gap can flatter people into thinking they are doing better than they are.

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Why you'd press play

If your attention keeps leaking away, start here.

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