Dorie Clark

The average professional attends 62 meetings per month.

That sounds pretty outrageous.

How could that be?

But if you actually break it down, it's not that many.

It's two to three meetings per day, which is probably average for many of you.

So 62 meetings a month, that does not help, and that is not wrong.

It is a contributor.

Also, we know, we know what else.

Email, a study a while back by McKinsey, showed that the average professional spends 28 percent of their time just responding to email.

Of course that drains us.

Of course that makes us busy.

But the truth is, it's also, I believe, not the full picture.

Those are manifestations.

Those are problems, legitimately.

But there are also some other things going on underneath the surface, reasons that perhaps we are in some ways working at cross-purposes.

Because for so long, almost all of us have said we want desperately to be less busy.

And yet we keep making choices that put ourselves in the position where we're just as busy as we've always been.

What is going on?

Well, some research out of Columbia University sheds a little bit of light on this.

Sylvia Baletza and her colleagues have done interesting research into the fact that in some cultures, American culture chief among them, busyness is actually a form of status.