January 3, 2026
Calendar chaos or content farm?
Busy Is the New Stupid
‘Busy Is the New Stupid’ or AI Clickbait? Commenters split, memes fly
TLDR: A viral post maps busyness to a hacker-style “attack” list—like Meeting Overload and Email Bombardment—and prescribes meeting-free blocks and device cutoffs. The crowd split fast: some liked the message, others called it AI-flavored fluff, exposing a bigger fight over performative productivity and always-on work culture.
The internet lit up over a post on CISO Tradecraft that treats busyness like a hacker attack: “T1001 Meeting Overload,” “T1002 Email Bombardment,” and “T3001 Always‑On Culture,” complete with defenses like meeting‑free days, “digital sunset” device cutoffs, and JOMO (the joy of missing out). It’s basically a cheeky “malware map” for your calendar—until readers hit those mysterious T‑codes and went, huh?
That confusion exploded into drama. One reader confessed, “I’m feeling stupid reading this,” but still liked the message. Another threw the flag, calling it “an LLM (large language model) generated site” and slamming it as low‑effort. Fans praised the simple fixes—single‑tasking, outcome over hours—while skeptics saw the T‑numbering as gimmicky cosplay. Cue memes: folks compared “Urgency Injection” to a fake vaccine, and joked that “Productivity Theater” deserves an Oscar. Even the “Impact” section cuts off mid‑word (“incomplet”), which critics said hilariously proves the point: we’re too busy to finish a sentence. Behind the snark, a real split emerged—is this a helpful anti‑busyness playbook or AI‑flavored productivity soup? Either way, the post hit a nerve with anyone drowning in pings, standing meetings, and performative grind culture. The battle between “do less, better” and “this is just tech buzzword bingo” is officially on.
Key Points
- •The article defines a tactical framework showing how busyness starts, spreads, persists, and evades defenses.
- •Initial Access techniques include meeting overload, email bombardment, and urgency injection, with mitigations like calendar audits and email triage.
- •Execution techniques (multitasking, context switching, reactive mode) are countered by single-tasking, task batching, Pomodoro, and proactive planning.
- •Persistence techniques (always-on culture, productivity theater, FOMO) are addressed via digital sunset, outcome metrics, JOMO, and availability SLAs.
- •Defense evasion and impact include boundary erosion, priority confusion, delegation avoidance, leading to strategic blindness and degraded decision quality, with methods like MIT and 80/20 analysis to mitigate.