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Radio 4,3 mins

Busy-ness is NOT a competition

Radio 4 in Four

Available for over a year

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." Stop it! First broadcast on Oliver Burkeman Is Busy, 13 September 2016.

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