For years, being busy has been treated as a sign of commitment and productivity. But having some capacity doesn't mean someone is contributing less. It can create the space to think more carefully, respond when priorities change, and ultimately do better work.
For a long time in my career, I pretended to be much busier than I actually was. I became pretty good at it, too, to the point where I used to joke with friends that I had mastered the ability to always appear extremely busy. Eventually, people began approaching me with some variation of, “I know you're super busy, but...” before asking whether I could help with something else.
What makes that behavior interesting to me now is that I wasn't pretending to be busy because I wanted to avoid the additional work. If someone asked me to take another project, I usually did. If a teammate needed help, I helped. If something required additional hours, I worked them. The performance wasn't an excuse to contribute less. I had simply learned, somewhere along the way, that being busy was the answer I was expected to give.
There is a strange professional incentive behind this that took me years to fully recognize. If your manager asks whether you can take on another project and you explain that you're already extremely busy but will find a way to make it work, your willingness to accept the additional responsibility can be interpreted as evidence of commitment. If the same manager asks the same question and you simply say that you have some availability and would be happy to take it, you are doing exactly what is expected of you. In both cases, the same person may accept the same project and produce exactly the same result, yet somehow the person who was already overwhelmed can appear more committed than the person who had enough capacity to absorb the work comfortably.
I've seen variations of this throughout my career, and I don't think the behavior is usually deliberate or dishonest. In many professional environments, being busy gradually becomes part of how we communicate our value. Calendars remain full, people move continuously between meetings, and conversations about workload almost inevitably begin with how much everyone has going on. Over time, admitting that you have some availability can begin to feel strangely uncomfortable, as though having capacity suggests that you are not contributing enough.
What eventually made me question this wasn't a particular event but a pattern I began noticing. Everyone always seemed to be incredibly busy, including me, yet projects generally continued moving according to relatively normal schedules and estimates. Then something unexpected would happen, whether it was a production issue, a new client priority, an urgent request, or another team needing support, and somehow the same group of people who had supposedly been operating at full capacity would find a way to absorb it.
The more often I saw this happen, the more I began to wonder whether we were really as busy as we said we were. In many cases, I think we had simply become accustomed to describing ourselves that way.
There are also very practical reasons why people learn to protect their availability. In many organizations, efficiency is rewarded with additional work. Someone who finishes early receives another task, while someone who becomes particularly good at what they do gradually accumulates more responsibility. Growth and increased responsibility can certainly be positive, and some of the most meaningful opportunities in my own career came from being trusted with more. The problem begins when additional capacity automatically becomes something that needs to be filled.
I've seen an even more complicated version of this with talented individual contributors. An exceptional developer, for example, performs so well that the natural progression is often to make that person a lead. Suddenly, the skills that made them successful are no longer the only skills the role requires. They may now be responsible for mentoring people, supporting career development, communicating across teams, resolving conflicts, and creating the conditions for other people to succeed, sometimes without anyone really considering whether they have the capacity for those responsibilities, whether they have been prepared for them, or even whether managing people is something they want to do.
As I've moved through different leadership roles and eventually became responsible for my own companies, my perspective on capacity has changed considerably. Today, if someone on my team has completed what they are responsible for and has some availability, I am genuinely happy for them. I don't feel an immediate need to fill every available hour with another task, and I have become far less interested in traditional signals of productivity such as whether someone begins at precisely the expected time, appears occupied for every hour of the day, or occasionally spends a few minutes looking at LinkedIn or Instagram.
What matters much more to me now is whether people are delivering what they are responsible for, producing work we are proud of, and being available to support the team when they are needed. Those things tell me considerably more about someone's contribution than how effectively they can demonstrate that every minute of their day has been consumed.
Having some availability doesn't necessarily mean doing nothing, either. Some of my own quieter periods allowed me to double-check numbers rather than rushing through them, spend more time improving an SOW, think through a problem before responding, check in with someone on the team, or simply approach the work at a more sustainable pace. I don't think every moment of unused capacity needs to be converted immediately into another deliverable in order to have value.
There will always be periods when work becomes intense. Deadlines, production issues, changing requirements, and unexpected priorities are realities of the kind of work I've spent my career doing, and there are times when everyone genuinely needs to put in additional effort to get something across the finish line. I don't see anything inherently wrong with that. What I've become much more skeptical of is the idea that this exceptional level of intensity should somehow become the permanent state against which commitment is measured.
In fact, one of the contradictions I've come to appreciate is that a team operating at genuine full capacity all the time has very little ability to respond when something unexpected happens. Some degree of availability can create room to think more carefully, help someone else, improve the quality of the work, absorb a new priority, or simply recover from an unusually demanding period before the next one arrives.
After more than two decades of working with and leading teams, I no longer see availability as evidence that someone isn't doing enough. If anything, I've become more interested in whether we are creating environments where people can deliver excellent work without needing to perform exhaustion as proof of their commitment.
For years, saying that I was busy felt like the professionally correct answer, regardless of how much capacity I actually had. These days, I'm perfectly comfortable admitting when I have some availability, and I would like the people who work with me to feel equally comfortable doing the same.
Perhaps that is the shift I've come to appreciate most. Having capacity doesn't mean someone is less committed, less valuable, or less interested in the success of the work. Sometimes it simply means the work is under control. And when the next deadline moves, priority changes, problem appears, or teammate needs help, having a little room to respond may be exactly what the team needs.
It's okay to have some availability.