Disrupting the busy-ness - business production line: A 'timey-wimey' reminder of what counts

 

The movement of being busy is perhaps what we have always known and taken on board as a good thing. Afterall, being seen to be doing is so often rewarded by the environments we live and work in. The constant testing in education, and then later the annual professional development reviews, or the spine points we climb are just a few examples. There is counting too - how quickly, how much and how far - the preferred direction so often upwards. In this drive for productivity, where positive pace and direction are uniquely valued, individual needs can fall by the wayside. The constant push for development, along a set and linear path -the busy-ness to business production line- forges ahead into the world of work.

"As young people move into adult life, they must have the right pathways through further and higher education and into good employment" (Plan for Change, 2024).

Our earliest steps are measured, quantified and categorised with this purpose in mind. From the age of 2, children attending childcare settings in the UK are reported on against national standards. A short read through Development Matters, 2023, a government resource aimed at offering developmental guidance and support, quickly highlights the preferred route; a single way of being, peppered with milestones and junctions that mark the desired point by which certain levels of development should be achieved. 

This narrow developmental pathway is at odds with the concept of neurodiversity, an understanding that all brains and bodies -bodyminds (Walker & Raymaker, 2021)- naturally diverge and are inherently different. There is no standard way of being. Instead of understanding and accepting difference, developmental criteria match and judge divergence against a socially constructed hierarchy, where only one way of being is best. Failure to keep pace or to meet the expectations of this hierarchy is considered a delay; a cause for concern, requiring 'specialist' support.

Any "concern that a child may have a developmental delay, (...) may indicate a special educational need (SEN) or disability" (DFE, 2025).   

Let's imagine for one moment a production line. Where delay holds up productivity, the immediate response by the business owner would be to send in the 'fix it' team. Their job would be to find the problem and straighten out the line so that production could resume. At times, SEN provision can feel like this. 'Delays in development' trigger a systemic, and at times almost knee-jerk response. With little time to consider social models of disability, the SEN system focuses instead on the individual as the 'problem' that needs to be fixed. Streams of meetings, referrals, and the resulting influx of reports all cite ways in which interventions can help bring a person back 'in line' with expected outcomes. Solving and fixing the 'person as problem' becomes the focus, with pressure from all sides sitting heaviest on individuals who are already working hard in environments too often designed with standard experiences of the world in mind. 

Then there is the weight of the SEN train that itself can be hard to bear. The multitude of professionals, typically excavating in great detail their particular nuanced interpretation of deficit. This can open the wound of stigma and shame. The individual, and those closest to them, become buried in the forever of 'being done to' and lost in the 'unbecoming of authenticity'. There are of course professionals who advocate from a different place, who genuinely see a person, not just an assessment or a set of outcome measures (Divergent Perspectives, 2026; Richardson & Mears, 2026). Experience sensitive care (McGreevy et al, 2024) is essential for wellbeing in healthcare and beyond. To do this we must practice how to listen to a person and to people (Katy, 2026), and not just respond to what we have been told by experts in official guidelines and directives. Sadly, informed and neurodiversity-affirming ways of practising and working are, in my experience, still far too rare. 

The difficulties I have with an SEN approach are not to say that SEN support is completely unwelcome. At times the offer of help of any kind can feel like a much-needed reprise from other lenses of scrutiny. A first and universal corrective measure for delays and differences can often be behaviourism. These are the time-outs and later on internal and external exclusions, countered by rewards for good attendance and a positive 'growth' mindset. When such measures consistently fail, and after much damage has happened, SEN support feels like someone is finally listening. Yet, the end goal of both approaches is often similar; the purpose remains change, albeit in the case of SEN support, done under the guise of understanding and care. I have read far too many Educational Health and Care Plans (EHCPs), including that of my own son, where the goals are those of the system, not those of the person. Individuals and individual needs can too often remain invisible in a system that measures value only in metrics of productivity. 

With ever tightening criteria of what it means to be 'good', where 'working above' or 'exceeding' is really what is preferred, the systems we call education and care groan at the seams, struggling to cope with increasing numbers of young people who need to be 're-set'. The pressure to consistently categorise and judge, with the aim of bringing everyone back into the 'production' line, means that the very systems designed to help, can themselves be a toll for all involved. This is captured by ever longer waiting lists for assessment or diagnosis, which in turn feed into further chunked offerings- the brief intervention, the 6-week therapy block or the far too common, therapeutic break. This is the care monopoly, where provision is designed for and dictated by the very system that delivers it. It is a rigid, one-track, 'busy-ness/ business' way of doing things: solution-focused and outcome heavy. Even the SMART vocabulary of business abounds, yet few query the ethics, as it is hard to know any different, if this is all you have ever known.  

Disrupting 'business as usual', placing greater value on self-determination: on autonomy, competence and relational aspects of being, moves the focus towards genuine human to human care-work, and away from busy performative outcomes. We need to bring a halt to the constant productivity and production focus of how we nurture and care for others. We need to reclaim time to be ourselves. This isn't some militant standpoint or political argument. It is instead an observation on what is harmful, and the work that is needed to offer something more human and more vital for wellbeing. Recognising and having space to share that our care systems themselves are those causing harm (Ashworth et al., 2025) is an important part of the unlearning; it is a much needed wake up call for change, and a place from which other ways of being, knowing and doing can be considered.

We can learn much from stepping off the track we seem to have always walked, to take a look beyond our typical Global North world view, built on commerce and capitalist intent. Relational and indigenous cultures for example teach us that time is not linear but expansive and intergenerational. This single act, of re-considering time, further highlights the inadequacy of the language of delay, and its parallel role in providing a foundation for disorder. Natural order is not the absence of difference, but the whole of existence working as one. Expanding time: making time to build relationships - the time that is needed, not the time that is available -, defending our right to time as a foundational element of caregiving, rather than a block to be ticked off or waited for; knowing that in giving time and taking time, we are also caring for ourselves, as well as for others, these are all acts that disrupt the 'busy-ness' and business aspects of care. We build instead space for relationships, putting people first and valuing their knowledge of being in the world. This creates space for curiosity, for exploration and trust in the value of epistemic authority, rather than the authority of data.

The cafe was one of the few robust attention tunnels I had. I built my life around it. I didn’t understand at the time why it worked so well. I knew it was a good environment but why it was so good wasn’t obvious. It worked because of the tunnels. It enabled me to ‘plan tunnels not tasks’. To build my day around my flow states. (Jamie and Lion, 2021)

In reclaiming time to be human, to be with and alongside other humans, to meet individual needs and circumstances, we can all redefine what it is to care. This is a shift that helps both disrupt and reframe, as care giver and care receiver. We can move from the busy-ness/ business model of care time to time that cares for authentic, unique and very human needs. 

This different sort of journey offers the possibility for different views and beautiful, perhaps never-before imagined, horizons to unfold. The meaning of silence moves from non-compliance or pathology, to a 'right' (Hackett et al, 2025). Meanwhile authentic communication, that falls outside of linear time - gestalt language processing and asynchronous communication to give just a couple of examples- can be seen, understood and valued. Reconceiving therapy is equally about taking a different path with time. Instead of doing and demanding more, in fixed and set periods, therapy could be about taking a space of reprieve, respite from production, from counting and measuring; a place where simply being is what is most important, and unapologetically repurposing the vocabulary of what counts most!

When we take a moment to come off the singular mono-rail and spend time in our own or another person's lifeworld, we become (co)-explorers, no longer constrained and restrained by itineraries and guides, the possibilities of what can be are infinite. And, in taking this time, we actively create more time: time only unfolds in a linear way if that is what we choose.

"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff." (Tenth Dr Who, 2007)

Our systems, care and education, are wholly set up so to follow this 'strict progression' and fit within the linear, business mould of time. We are so busy quantifying and ticking off the next steps, we miss out on what time really means for and to us as humans. Time Stuff is harder to measure, harder to hear about and very much harder to put into place. Yet, it is the wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff of individual lives and unique ways of being that we need to hold onto and value if we are going to truly break free of the false safety of the production line.

"We who occupy the bodies of crip time know that we are never linear, and we rage silently—or not so silently—at the calm straightforwardness of those who live in the sheltered space of normative time." (Samuels, 2017).

Let's do more to embrace that rage alongside and with each other, together!