Why You’re Exhausted After Doing “Nothing” All Day

Busyness is the most socially acceptable form of procrastination.

Photo by Ashton Bingham on Unsplash

Count the tabs open on your screen right now. I’ll wait.

Ten? Thirty? More? And still, tonight, you won’t be able to name one thing you actually built today.

You think it’s a discipline problem. It isn’t. Engineers have a name for what’s really happening in your head.

It’s called thrashing.

Inside a computer, it happens when the machine runs out of working memory. To keep up, it starts shuffling data back and forth, again and again. The fan screams. Everything crawls. The machine is working at full speed, and almost nothing useful gets done.

Nothing is broken. The hardware isn’t weak. The computer is just spending all its energy managing the queue instead of running the code.

Thrashing is what happens when a system spends more effort managing work than doing it.

That’s your Tuesday.

Now look at your screen again.

Nine tabs shrunk to tiny icons from a research rabbit hole you fell into last Thursday. A Slack icon blinking red. A video paused at minute twelve. A half-written document you abandoned yesterday because someone…