In defence of busywork

While you know it feels terrific to cross off a whopper of a task on your to-do list, busywork has its inherent values

WHILE WE ALL still have human, flesh jobs, much of the allure of AI has come from the prospect that it could get rid of the boring busywork. What could be more appealing than eliminating all that soul-draining time spent doing rote tasks?

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Maybe all that boring stuff is worth saving, though — and more people are arguing this exact point.

“Workdays without busywork are closer to reality than ever, thanks to artificial intelligence,” wrote The Wall Street Journal’s Callum Borchers. “This sounds great. The catch is that our brains aren’t capable of thinking big thoughts nonstop. And we risk forfeiting the epiphanies that sometimes spring to mind while doing easy, repetitive job functions.”

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There are those in the business world who are starting to see this. Borchers quotes Roger Kirkness, CEO of the software firm Convictional, who said he leaves his staff a blank schedule when they come back from vacation, so that they can spend some of that slack time doing busywork and letting the brain warm back up. Executive coach LK Pryzant also told The Wall Street Journal she calls it ‘white space’ on the calendar. “Busywork sounds low-value, but white space sounds creative and it sounds strategic,” she said. “The outcome is the same.”

The core of the argument in defense of busywork comes down to creativity, and the proponents have a point. “A large number of our best product ideas have come from engineers doing the same repetitive data validation work over and over again, where they notice patterns that would lead to larger insight,” said Metaintro founder Lacey Kaelani Dahan, speaking to ZDNET. “Once we eliminated that repetitive task and automated it, we definitely improved automation, but we lost the incidental learning that happens [through] seeing the data.”

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And really, is busywork that bad? “Many merely find busywork peaceful,” wrote Lauren Larson in The Verge. “There was nothing stressful about the work. It allowed me to recover my wits in between high-stress incidences of talking to customers.”

In the age of AI, where the expectation is that we shift our resources to more high-level stuff, we’re taking on extra burnout risk and losing space to let our minds wander and discover. “We live in a time when everything from ad-free streaming services to self-driving cars can supposedly liberate us from the mundane,” Borchers opined. “We ought to be careful about ridding ourselves of all boredom, lest we lose our creativity in the process.”