Frequently asked questions

LookingBusy is a parody productivity site. You pick a persona (CEO, founder, consultant, dog breeder, and more), smash some keys, and the dashboard performs a convincing impression of someone in the middle of a busy day — emails, Slack pings, KPI charts that recalculate themselves, urgent meetings. Nothing is real. The texture is accurate.

Yes. There's no signup, no paywall, no free tier vs. paid tier. We may add a newsletter eventually, but the core simulator is free and will stay free.

That's the entire point. The simulator is designed to be unrecognizable from real productivity software at a six-foot glance. If anyone walks up close, press \ (Boss Mode) and the screen flips to a convincing decoy — fake Excel, fake VS Code, fake PowerPoint, fake Figma. Press M and you're on a fake Zoom call.

Use the dropdown in the top header. Each mode has its own KPI labels, message pool, sample emails, and crises. There are also dedicated landing pages — try /modes/executive, /modes/founder, /modes/designer, etc.

Press \ (backslash) and the dashboard flips to a fake decoy: a spreadsheet, a code editor, a Google Doc, a PowerPoint deck, or a Figma file. Each decoy is animated — terminals scroll, slides advance, comments multiply — so it reads as live work, not a screenshot. Use it when someone walks up to your desk and you'd rather they not see what you were actually doing.

Press M and you're on a fake Zoom call with mode-appropriate participants. CEO mode shows board members. VC mode shows partners and LPs. Breeder mode shows your vet and a stud owner. Useful when you want to look unavailable without actually scheduling anything.

No. This is a parody site, not a training tool. If you want to prepare for a real role, look at real prep resources. LookingBusy is what the job feels like once you have it.

Yes — use the Suggest a Mode link in the simulator footer, or email [email protected]. The engine works for any specific professional world, so if you can describe the texture of your daily work, we can probably build it.

We use cookieless, privacy-friendly analytics (Vercel Web Analytics). No tracking cookies, no advertising profiles, no personal data collected. The full details are on the privacy policy page.

After your stress level climbs to critical, the Score link in the footer becomes available. Click it and you get a Founder Mythology title earned for your performance — something like 'Calm Executive' or 'Operational Theater Champion' — which you can share. It's a soft reward for surviving the cascade.

Because the joke needs the texture to be real. Most fake-productivity sites stop at the visual layer. We modeled the actual rhythm of pings, the conflicting asks, the meeting about the meeting, the 4:47 PM Friday escalation. That's what makes the simulation funny — and useful as a way of feeling seen.

It's a project from Bob Van Labs. The interactive engine, all eight mode content banks, and the boss-mode decoys are hand-built. More about the project on the about page.

Yes, with some caveats. The simulator was designed for desktop and reads best at full-screen on a laptop. Mobile is functional — sample emails and chat render fine — but Boss Mode and Fake Meeting are most effective on a real screen.