Describe a Time When You Were Very Busy
A Band 8 model answer for the IELTS Part 2 cue card about a busy period, with the narrative tenses that hold a two minute story together.
Cue Card
Describe a time when you were very busy.
You should say:
- when it was
- what you had to do
- how you managed your time
And explain how you felt about it.
Busy is easy to claim and hard to demonstrate. Saying you had a lot of work and slept very little takes fifteen seconds and proves nothing, and then the answer stalls.
What fills two minutes is the collision: several separate things that were individually fine and impossible together. The answer below names three and shows how they overlapped.
Model Answer
Band 8The period I'd describe was about six weeks in the spring of last year, when three things landed on top of each other by pure bad luck.
I was finishing a project at work with a fixed deadline, which had been planned for months. At the same time my sister was getting married and I'd agreed, months earlier when it seemed abstract, to handle most of the arrangements because she lives abroad. And then in the middle of that my landlord decided to sell the flat, so I had eight weeks to find somewhere else to live.
What I did, once I stopped panicking, was fairly mechanical. I wrote down every single thing that had to happen and put a real date next to it, and I discovered that about a third of them didn't actually have deadlines, I'd just assumed they were urgent. Then I stopped doing anything that wasn't on that list, which meant I saw almost nobody for a month and my flat got genuinely disgusting. I also asked for help in a way I normally avoid, and my brother took over all the wedding transport, which I should have done much earlier.
How I felt is complicated. During it I was functioning but not enjoying anything, and I remember a strange flatness rather than stress, as if there wasn't room to have feelings about it. Afterwards I felt oddly good, and I've been suspicious of that feeling since. It's easy to mistake being busy for being useful. Looking back, the project mattered, the wedding mattered, and quite a lot of what I did in those six weeks was neither.
Why This Answer Works
- Three separate pressures give the answer structure. The examiner can follow work, wedding, and housing as distinct threads without any signposting.
- The past perfect is used precisely. "Which had been planned for months" and "I'd agreed, months earlier" place events before the main narrative, which is exactly what the tense is for.
- The disgusting flat and seeing nobody are unflattering specifics. They demonstrate how busy the period was far better than any adjective could.
- The ending refuses the obvious moral. Instead of concluding that hard work pays off, it questions whether the busyness was useful, and that skepticism is much harder to fabricate.
Key Phrases to Steal
“landed on top of each other”
Phrasal verb describing coincidence. Vivid and informal.
“once I stopped panicking”
Time clause that admits the panic without dwelling on it.
“I'd just assumed they were urgent”
Past perfect plus adverb, showing a corrected belief.
“a strange flatness rather than stress”
Precise emotional vocabulary. Better than "I was very stressed".
“mistake being busy for being useful”
Two gerunds in a compact contrast. Memorable and grammatically neat.
Part 3 Follow-Up Questions
Do people work longer hours now than in the past?
The measured hours haven't changed enormously in most developed countries, but the boundaries have dissolved, which I think matters more. Work used to end when you left the building, and now it follows people home on a phone, so the hours you're actually available are far longer than the hours you're paid for. There's also a status element, since being visibly overworked has become a way of signalling that you're important, and that pressure is quite hard to resist.
How can people balance work and personal life?
Most of the useful answers are structural rather than about willpower. Fixed boundaries that other people can see, like leaving at a set time or not having work email on your phone, hold up much better than private intentions. Beyond that, I'd say the honest answer is that balance often requires giving something up, a promotion or an income level, and advice that pretends otherwise isn't much help.
Is being busy always a bad thing?
Not at all, and I'd distinguish between busy and overloaded. A period of intense work towards something you chose is usually satisfying, and people often describe those months afterwards as the most alive they've felt. What damages people is being busy without control over what they're doing or when it ends. The volume of work seems to matter far less than whether you picked it.
Now Try It Out Loud
Reading a model answer is one thing — saying it under pressure is another. Practise this exact cue card with our AI examiner and get instant band-score feedback.