The cursor flickered, a tiny, impatient pulse against David’s shared screen. On it, his calendar, a densely packed grid of color-coded blocks, stretched through the week like an unyielding brick wall. Every slot filled, every hour accounted for. “As you can see,” he announced, a thin veil of pride in his voice, “I’m slammed.” My own calendar, admittedly, often mirrors his, a testament to the belief that activity equals output. But I remember a time, not so long ago, when slammed meant getting actual, tangible work done, not just discussing it.

I’ve found myself in David’s shoes more often than I’d like to admit, proudly displaying a schedule that leaves precisely zero minutes for focused, deep work. The emails fly back and forth at a frantic pace, late into the evening, just to prove I’m “on it.” We mistake a packed inbox and rapid-fire replies for high performance, a genuine contribution to the bottom line. But what if it’s merely a defense mechanism, a performance born from the anxiety of invisible labor? In the nebulous realm of knowledge work, where contribution is often intangible, we’ve created visible proxies for ‘effort.’ This isn’t productivity; it’s a meticulously choreographed play, a productivity theater leading to mass burnout without a corresponding increase in actual progress.

A Stark Contrast

There’s a small park near my office, and I’ve watched Luca B. work there many times. Luca, a graffiti removal specialist, doesn’t deal in proxies. When a wall is defaced, his job is clear: make the defacement disappear. He arrives with his solvents and brushes, and an hour or two later, the offensive scrawl is gone. The result is immediate, undeniable, and universally understood. You can see the clean brick, feel the absence of the grime. There’s no meeting to discuss the defacement, no email chain about solution architectures, no follow-up call to confirm the graffiti is *really* gone. It’s just… gone. His work exists in a realm where the outcome is as solid as the ground he stands on, a stark contrast to the endless digital churn.

The Performance Habit

I catch myself sometimes, scheduling another ‘quick sync’ or sending an email late on a Friday, just to show I’m still engaged, still thinking about things. A part of me knows it’s often unnecessary, a slight embellishment, a performance for an audience of one (myself, usually). It’s a habit I’m trying to unlearn, though it’s deeply ingrained. We’re all, in some small way, performers in this play. The stage lights are always on, and the curtain never quite falls. The irony is, the harder we perform, the more exhausted we become, the less genuine work gets done.

This isn’t to say that all meetings are useless, or that every email is a performative act. Collaboration is vital, discussion is necessary, and communication is the bedrock of any successful endeavor. But the proportion is off, drastically so. We’re spending 49% of our time in meetings, according to some recent whispers in the digital corridors, and an alarming 239 minutes a day on email. These numbers aren’t just statistics; they represent stolen moments of genuine creation, quiet contemplation, and the space needed for truly innovative thought.

Busyness as a Proxy

It feels like we’ve collectively agreed to operate under a false premise: that busy looks good. That a full calendar is a badge of honor. I’ve been guilty of it myself. A few years ago, I proudly displayed my own packed schedule, convinced that the sheer volume of my engagements signaled my indispensable value. My team, I now realize, probably saw an exhausted leader, not an effective one. It’s one of those contradictions I live with: knowing better, but occasionally falling back into old patterns. We all want to feel valued, and in the absence of clear, measurable outcomes, especially in creative or strategic roles, busyness becomes the easiest proxy for impact.

The Value of Space

But what if we could shift our focus? What if we valued space and deep work over back-to-back calls? Imagine a system where the quiet hum of concentration was celebrated more than the frantic keyboard clatter. Where the quality of a single, well-executed project mattered more than participation in a dozen. The sensory world offers such a tangible contrast. Think about the experience of a perfectly crafted meal, say, at a fine west loop restaurant. The dish arrives, beautiful, fragrant, the result of focused effort and expertise. There’s no question about the output, no ambiguity. The work is self-evident in its deliciousness and presentation, a real, immediate, and satisfying conclusion.

Losing Touch with Real Connection

I was watching a commercial the other day, one of those subtly poignant ones that sneak up on you, and I found myself inexplicably tearing up. It was about connection, about genuine presence. And it made me wonder, are we so busy performing that we’re losing touch with what’s actually real, actually connecting? This intense schedule, this digital performance, often isolates us, ironically, from the very human connections we crave. We’re all in the same boat, rowing frantically, looking busy, but perhaps not truly moving forward. There’s a certain melancholy in that, a quiet sadness for the lost moments, the unspoken thoughts, the genuinely creative impulses that get drowned out by the constant hum of manufactured urgency.

Shifting the Culture

We need to shift from a culture that rewards presence in meetings to one that rewards absence for focused work. We need to measure outcomes, not just activities. It won’t be easy. The inertia of current habits is powerful, a collective agreement we’ve all unwittingly signed. It will require leadership to model new behaviors, to champion dedicated ‘no meeting’ blocks, to celebrate quiet progress. It will mean having uncomfortable conversations, asking what really *needs* to be done, not just what *can* be done. The shift might feel like losing control initially, stepping away from the comforting illusion of constant motion. But the reward could be profound: less burnout, more innovation, and a return to the joy of genuinely impactful work.

The Wisdom of Stopping

It’s a thought that keeps me up sometimes, turning over in my mind like a smooth river stone. What if the next breakthrough isn’t born from the relentless pursuit of more tasks, but from the deliberate cultivation of less? What if the most productive thing we could do today is nothing at all for a sustained period? It’s a counterintuitive notion in a world that valorizes always-on, always-doing. But then, Luca B. doesn’t endlessly scrub a clean wall. He cleans the mess, then he waits for the next genuine need. Perhaps there’s a lesson in that for all of us, a quiet suggestion in the absence of busyness. We’re collectively chasing something that often feels like value, like success, like achievement. But maybe, just maybe, the real prize isn’t in the chasing, but in the finding – and sometimes, finding requires us to just stop for a moment. To breathe. To create without an audience, to achieve without the need to perform. And at the end of the day, to know what’s truly finished, truly clean, truly done.