I’m squinting at the grid of nineteen faces on my screen, and my left eye is pulsing with the fire of a thousand suns because I managed to get a glob of tea tree shampoo directly onto my cornea this morning. It’s 3:09 PM. I should be focused on the spreadsheet, but instead, I’m trying to look like I’m focused on the spreadsheet. There is a distinct difference. We are currently in a ‘pre-alignment’ call for the steering committee meeting that happens in nine days. Dave is talking about ‘leveraging synergies,’ which is corporate-speak for ‘I have no idea what I’m doing but I’m doing it loudly.’ Everyone is nodding. I nod too, even though the movement makes the shampoo-burn sting more. We are all participating in a grand, expensive play, and the tickets cost $199 per hour in billable time.

I recently spoke with Lily A.J., a queue management specialist who has spent the last nine years studying how people wait. She told me something that broke my brain: ‘Most people would rather wait in a line that is moving toward a brick wall than stand in a stationary line that leads to a prize.‘ We need the illusion of motion. We crave the feeling of being occupied because if we stop, we have to face the output. And the output? Often, it’s zero.

The Illusion of Availability

I’m guilty of it. I’ll spend thirty-nine minutes formatting an email that takes nine seconds to read. I’ll join a meeting where I’m the ninth person on the invite list, knowing full well I won’t say a single word. Why? Because if I’m not in the meeting, I’m ‘unavailable.’ In the modern workplace, ‘available’ is synonymous with ‘productive,’ which is arguably the biggest lie told since the invention of the open-plan office. Lily A.J. pointed out that in her field, she sees businesses creating ‘buffer queues’-loops of activity that serve no purpose other than to keep the customer from realizing the system is overloaded. We do this to ourselves internally. We create loops of ‘checking in,’ ‘circling back,’ and ‘touching base.’

My eye is still watering. I look like I’m crying over the quarterly projections, which honestly, wouldn’t be the weirdest thing that’s happened this week. The problem is that our systems reward the performance, not the result. If you finish your work in three hours but your contract says forty-nine hours a week, you don’t get twenty-six hours of freedom; you get more work. So, you learn to stretch. You learn to make the three hours look like nine. You become an actor. I’ve seen teams spend $9,999 worth of man-hours debating the color of a button on a landing page that only nine people will ever click.

The Shield of Busyness

We’ve become obsessed with the appearance of being busy. It’s a defense mechanism. In an era of layoffs and AI-driven anxiety, a full calendar is a shield. If you’re in a meeting, you can’t be fired, right? You’re ‘essential.’ But this shield is made of paper. It erodes trust because everyone knows the game. Your manager knows you’re answering emails during the Zoom call. You know your manager is looking at LinkedIn in another tab. We’ve reached a state of collective hallucination where we pretend to work, they pretend to pay attention, and the actual progress happens in the cracks between the performances.

This obsession with optics over outcomes is particularly frustrating when you look at industries that deal with the physical world. There is a brutal honesty in tangibility. You cannot performatively install a floor. You either did the work, or people are tripping over subflooring. If you need a Bathroom Remodel or to redo your living room, you aren’t looking for a series of ‘alignment sessions’ or a PowerPoint presentation on the synergy of hardwood grains. You want a floor that doesn’t squeak and looks beautiful under your feet. The physical world has a way of cutting through the corporate fluff. You can’t ‘circle back’ to a poorly laid carpet. You fix it, or you fail. This is the kind of accountability we’ve lost in the digital cubicle.

The Fatigue of Pretense

Lily A.J. and I discussed how this performative culture leads to a specific kind of exhaustion. It’s not the tiredness of a long day’s work; it’s the soul-crushing fatigue of pretending. It’s the 299th Slack notification of the day that asks, ‘Any updates?’ when both parties know there are none. We are managing the queue instead of serving the people in it. I’ve caught myself doing this-spending nine hours a week just managing my to-do list instead of actually doing the things on it. It’s a recursive loop of administrative overhead that produces nothing but stress and high-quality spreadsheets about why we’re behind schedule.

I remember a project back in 2019 where we had a ‘daily stand-up’ that lasted forty-nine minutes every single morning. There were nineteen of us. If you do the math, that’s over fifteen hours of human life evaporated every single day just to hear people say they were ‘still working on the thing from yesterday.’ It was a ritual, not a process. It was a way for the project manager to feel in control and for the developers to show they hadn’t fled the country. And when the project inevitably failed, we had a ‘post-mortem’ that lasted-you guessed it-another ninety-nine minutes to discuss why we didn’t have enough time.

The Snake Eating Its Tail

There is a deep irony in the fact that the more we talk about productivity, the less productive we become. We’ve professionalized the distraction. We have tools designed to ‘save time’ that actually just provide new ways to perform. I’ve seen people spend $499 on productivity software just to organize the tasks they are too tired to perform because they spent all day in ‘deep work’ webinars. It’s a snake eating its own tail, and the tail is made of ‘as per my last email’ threads.

We need to give people the permission to be ‘unavailable’ for nine hours straight so they can actually solve a problem. We need to stop rewarding the person who replies to every email within nine seconds and start rewarding the person who tells us the meeting is a waste of time and stays at their desk to actually finish the project. It requires a level of trust that most modern management structures aren’t built to handle.

Removing the Boards

Lily A.J. told me about a hospital that reduced its waiting times by 39% simply by removing the digital tracking boards that showed the staff how many people were waiting. When the staff stopped performing for the board, they started focusing on the patients. The theater was gone, so the work could begin. There’s a lesson there for all of us squinting into our webcams. If we stop worrying about how the queue looks, we might actually get through it.

We need to stop mistaking the sound of the engine for the movement of the car. The loudest meetings are often the ones where the least is decided. The longest email threads are where clarity goes to die. If we want to find our way back to actual productivity, we have to be willing to look ‘unproductive’ for a little while. We have to be willing to have nine minutes of silence in a room of nineteen people until someone actually has something useful to say.