The Hidden Cost of Being Busy | Why the most productive people do less (and accomplish more)
Dr. Dawna Ballard was racing through Howard's campus when a friend stopped and mimicked her—speed-walking comically fast across the yard. That mirror moment hit differently. She'd been moving so fast for so long, she didn't even know she was running.
Today, as an associate professor at UT Austin and expert in chronemics—the study of how time and communication intertwine—Dawna has discovered something that challenges everything we've been taught about productivity: The teams that move fastest aren't the ones with better schedules. They're the ones who know when to stop.
"We're building the car as we're driving it. Have you ever heard that?" Dawna asks about the phrase tech companies love. "Who wants to be in that car?"
When I sat down with Dawna for the Shaping Freedom podcast, I expected strategies for better time management. What I got was permission to redesign my entire relationship with time—and a wake-up call about why my body keeps trying to slow me down.
Here are three truths from our conversation that'll make you rethink why you're exhausted, why nothing feels finished, and what speed actually costs:
1. Your body wasn't designed for constant urgency
"We evolved with this fight or flight response for a good reason," Dawna explains. "There were wild animals that we were trying to survive so we needed to either fight and kill this animal or run away."
But now? "Most of us do not live in a world where the thing that frightens us is a wild animal that we have to run from or fight. Most of us live in a world of traffic on our way to work, of how many meetings can I fit in today?"
"Time, I argue, has replaced the wild animal, but you can't conquer time," she says.
The fight never ends, which means our bodies stay in perpetual emergency mode.
In 2016, Nobel laureates discovered what this means for our bodies: "One of the biggest predictors for illness and medical problems is misalignment between our internal clock and our lifestyle. And that if we develop a lifestyle that outpaces who and what we are, that's where you have problems."
Her own wake-up call came after years of four-hour nights during her tenure push. "I was then diagnosed with Sjögren's, an autoimmune disorder," she shares. "With autoimmune disorders your body thinks that you're dying. It thinks you’re under attack."
2. The teams that sit down together move fastest when it counts
Dawna studied children's advocacy centers where speed literally saves lives. When agencies worked separately, children fell through cracks. The solution (scheduling routine team meetings) seemed to waste precious time.
"Their supervisors often pressured them not to go,” Dawna recalls. They would say, "You don't have time for this. You just have to work the case."
But the teams that made space to sit together ended up with stronger outcomes.
"They almost read each other's mind," she explains. "Once you know someone really well, you can predict and anticipate what they're going to say...things get done faster and smoother."
3. Your brain's best work happens when you think you're doing nothing
"I just really thought if I was in motion that real things were being accomplished," Dawna admits. "And I realized that that's actually not the case. But sometimes when you're doing nothing, the stillness, there's a lot that's happening there."
She discovered the science behind this: "There's something called the default mode network...when fMRI technology first became available, they were looking for a baseline of where the brain wasn't doing anything. And they kept trying and they realized, oh, there's never a time when your brain isn't doing anything."
Her advice starts simple: "Look at your calendar and just see, is there one thing, one thing across a month that you could cancel or reschedule indefinitely?"
When students report discomfort with empty space, she responds: "Keep doing it until it doesn't feel uncomfortable. Or question...what is it about not being in chaos that feels uncomfortable?"
Years after that friend mimicked her frantic pace across Howard's yard, Dawna has learned what she was running from: the discomfort of being still long enough to hear what her body was trying to tell her. The mirror her friend held up that day wasn't just showing her speed—it was showing her fear. Fear that slowing down meant falling behind. Fear that stillness meant stagnation. Fear that if she stopped moving, she'd have to face the truth that all that motion wasn't taking her anywhere meaningful.
Now Dr. Ballard teaches what her former self couldn't have understood: The fastest way forward isn't through better time management or more efficient schedules. It's through the radical act of stopping long enough to ask yourself why you're running in the first place.
TL;DR
Motion without meaning is just expensive exhaustion. When you strip away the constant doing, the endless rushing and the performance of productivity, what remains is the truth—you can't conquer time, but you can choose how to spend it.
That discomfort you feel with empty space might be the exact medicine you need. Your body knows the difference between real threats and manufactured urgency—one requires action, the other requires rest, and confusing them is literally making you sick.
The fastest teams aren't the ones skipping meetings to save time—they're the ones investing in relationships that create efficiency. Real speed comes from knowing each other so well that you can predict, anticipate, and move as one when crisis hits.
Learn More
Follow Dr. Dawna Ballard on Instagram @iteachtime for daily reminders that slowing down isn't weakness—it's strategy, and that your calendar should serve your life, not consume it.
Read "Time by Design: How Communicating Slow Allows Us to Go Fast" to discover why Mark Zuckerberg's "move fast and break things" might be breaking you, and how to redesign your relationship with time before it redesigns you.
Tune into the full Shaping Freedom episode to hear why Dawna believes "I am the only person that can take care of me" and how one week of full sleep revealed exactly what her waking life was stealing from her body.