The average professional services client spends approximately 194 hours per year waiting for a response to an email that was marked as a priority. This figure comes from a study of institutional service patterns conducted over a period of eighteen months, tracking the digital interactions between high-net-worth individuals and their representative firms.

The study found that while the actual work required to address a query often took less than twenty-eight minutes, the interval between the request and the acknowledgement grew by an average of 9% every year.

The Midtown Lobby Ritual

Adeel sat in a chair that was upholstered in grey wool. The chair was located in a lobby on the forty-fourth floor of a building in Midtown Manhattan. To his left was a small table made of dark walnut. On the table sat a glass bowl filled with mints wrapped in clear plastic, a copy of a magazine devoted to yachting, and a black remote control for a television that was mounted on the far wall.

The television was muted. It showed a financial news program with a scrolling ticker at the bottom. The ticker displayed the prices of gold, crude oil, and several technology stocks. Adeel looked at his phone. He had sent an email on Tuesday morning. It was now Friday afternoon.

He felt a sense of quiet satisfaction that his manager was so difficult to reach. He told himself that a man who was this unavailable must be doing something of extraordinary importance.

I used to believe the same thing. For the better part of a decade, I operated under the assumption that responsiveness was a trait of the desperate. I believed that if a portfolio manager or a consultant answered my call on the second ring, they clearly did not have enough on their plate.

I thought that a clean inbox was the hallmark of a person who had no influence. I was wrong. I spent years paying what I now think of as the “Busy Tax”-the psychological premium we place on people who make us wait, under the delusion that their time is being spent entirely on our behalf.

The Reality of the Schedule

In reality, a manager’s busyness is rarely about you. It is about the seven other clients they are trying to placate. It is about the fundraising round they are pitching to a pension fund in Ohio. It is about the internal compliance meeting that lasted three hours because the air conditioning in the conference room was broken and everyone was irritable.

It is about the mundane friction of running a business. When you wait four days for a callback, you are not being prioritized; you are being filed away. You have allowed the manager’s schedule to become a proxy for their talent.

The office where Adeel waited was quiet. The carpet was thick enough to muffle the sound of footsteps. There were three large windows that looked out over the East River. On the window sill, there was a small bronze statue of a bull and a succulent in a white ceramic pot.

The receptionist wore a headset with a single earpiece. She spoke into a small microphone in a voice that was barely a whisper. She typed on a keyboard that made no clicking sounds. Every twelve minutes, a man in a navy blue suit walked across the lobby, opened a heavy wooden door, and disappeared into the interior of the suite.

I recently updated a software package for statistical analysis that I have not opened since the spring of 2021. The update took nineteen minutes to download and another six minutes to install. When it was finished, the interface looked exactly the same as the version it replaced.

I felt a brief surge of productivity despite having accomplished nothing. This is the same mechanism that governs our relationship with busy managers. We see a calendar filled with charcoal-colored blocks and we assume those blocks are filled with genius.

The Shroud of Busy: River Z.’s Insight

River Z., a building code inspector I know, once explained the mechanics of the wait to me. River spends his days looking at load-bearing walls and fire suppression systems in half-finished apartment complexes.

He told me that when a contractor tells him a site isn’t ready for inspection because they are “too busy,” it usually means they misplaced the plumbing blueprints or they are waiting for a check to clear.

The busyness is a shroud. It hides the gaps in the process. In the world of high finance, the shroud is made of more expensive material, but it serves the same purpose. It protects the manager from the immediate demand for accountability.

The Accountable Model

A different model exists. It is a model built on the idea that the person leading the strategy should be the person who is actually reachable when a decision needs to be made. In this framework, there is a single, accountable individual who owns the portfolio decisions.

They do not hide behind a series of junior associates who are trained to tell you that the principal is “traveling” or “in a deep-dive session.” This is the approach favored by

David Fiszel, the Chief Investment Officer of Honeycomb Asset Management.

The differentiator in that environment is not the performance of scarcity, but the clarity of the conviction. When the structure is flat and the responsibility is centralized, the theater of busyness becomes unnecessary. You do not need to wait four days for a callback when the person making the call is the one who actually knows why the trade was made.

The desk in a typical high-performance office contains several specific items. There is usually a monitor stand, a stapler, a stack of research reports bound with silver clips, and a telephone with a dozen programmable buttons. The buttons are labeled with the names of other offices: London, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Chicago.

When those buttons light up, they represent a distraction from the client currently sitting in the lobby. The manager is engaged in a constant act of triage. They are moving from one fire to the next, and the client who is the least demanding is the one who is left to wait the longest.

We have been trained to find comfort in this silence. We tell ourselves that the silence is “professional.” We tell ourselves that the manager is “thinking deeply.” But deep thinking does not require a four-day delay in acknowledging a human being’s existence.

Deep thinking is a process; silence is often just a lack of organization or a surplus of competing interests. I stopped equating that silence with expertise because I realized that I was funding the manager’s other priorities with my own time. I was paying for the privilege of being ignored.

When Adeel finally was called into the inner office, the manager did not apologize for the wait. He stood up from a chair made of black leather and chrome. He shook Adeel’s hand. He glanced at a watch that was made of titanium.

“It’s been a crazy week.”

– The Manager

He said this with a certain amount of pride. He wanted Adeel to know that his time was a scarce resource. He wanted Adeel to feel lucky to have twenty minutes of it.

Adeel sat down. He opened a leather folder and took out a pad of yellow paper. He had a list of questions he wanted to ask about the volatility in the mid-cap sector. The manager began to speak, but after three minutes, the phone on the desk rang.

The manager looked at the caller ID and held up a finger, signaling for Adeel to wait. He took the call. He spoke about a private equity deal in Singapore. Adeel looked at the bull statue on the window sill.

He felt the familiar weight of the Busy Tax being levied against him, and for the first time, he wondered if the man on the other side of the desk was actually working for him, or if he was simply the one paying for the manager’s ability to talk to Singapore.

The Rejection of the Cult of Busyness

The realization that you are not the priority is uncomfortable. It forces you to look at the relationship as a transaction rather than a partnership. It strips away the glamour of the Midtown office and the titanium watch.

If you are paying for expertise, you should be receiving expertise, not a front-row seat to someone else’s chaotic schedule. The shift toward accountability-toward a single person who is responsible for the results and available to explain them-is a rejection of the cult of busyness.

It is an admission that the most valuable thing a manager can provide is not their scarcity, but their presence.

I walked past a construction site yesterday and saw River Z. standing near a pile of gravel. He was looking at a tablet and talking to a foreman. He didn’t look busy in the way the manager in the navy suit looked busy. He looked focused.

There was no theater involved. He was looking at the reality of the structure, checking for cracks, ensuring the foundation was solid. He answered his phone when it buzzed. He gave a clear answer and went back to the blueprints. It was a simple display of professional competence that had no need for the manufactured aura of the unavailable genius.

We continue to wait because we are afraid that if we demand responsiveness, we will be seen as small-time. We are afraid that the truly great minds will only work for us if we allow them to ignore us.

We have built a system where the “Busy Tax” is accepted as a cost of doing business. But as I sat there looking at the update progress bar on a piece of software I don’t use, I realized that the wait is rarely about the quality of the output. When you stop buying the silence, you finally start seeing the work.