The Performance of Presence
My neck is locked at a 41-degree angle, a permanent tribute to the ergonomic failure of my home office setup, and I am currently watching a green dot flicker on a screen. It’s the digital equivalent of a heartbeat, proving to a nameless, faceless system that I am ‘here.’ But being here isn’t the same as doing something. This realization hit me hardest about 31 minutes ago when I watched a man in a silver SUV slide into the parking spot I had been signaling for at the grocery store. He didn’t even look at me. He just took the space because he could, much like how a 61-minute meeting on ‘synergy alignment’ takes the space of actual, deep work simply because someone has the calendar authority to claim it. We are living in an era where the parking spots of our cognitive energy are being stolen by the performative need to appear busy.
61 Min
Meeting Time
Synergy Alignment
0 Func.
Actual Output
Pre-Mortem Prep
We are preparing to prepare. The cost is calculable; the lost potential is not.
I’m currently sitting through a ‘pre-mortem’ for a project that hasn’t even been officially funded yet. There are 11 people on this call. If you calculate the hourly rate of everyone present, we’ve already spent roughly $1201 to decide that we should probably meet again next Tuesday to ‘circle back’ on the ‘key takeaways.’ It’s a recursive loop of administrative nothingness. We are preparing to prepare. We are planning to plan. We are performing the role of the diligent employee while the actual output remains a secondary concern. This is the rise of productivity theater, a stage play where the scripts are written in Jira tickets and the applause is measured in Slack reactions.
The Currency of Visibility
Hayden R.J., a digital citizenship teacher I spoke with recently, sees this trend manifesting even in the way we educate the next generation. Hayden observes that students are becoming more concerned with the timestamp of their submission than the quality of the thought within the essay.
“
‘If they can show they were logged into the portal for 51 hours,’ Hayden told me, ‘they feel they’ve earned the grade, regardless of the work’s depth.’ It’s a systemic infection. We’ve replaced the metric of ‘value created’ with ‘activity recorded.’
– Hayden R.J.
In the remote work landscape, this has devolved into a desperate dance of visibility. If your boss can’t see you sitting in a cubicle, you must ensure they see your name popping up in every thread, even if all you’re contributing is an ‘LGTM’ or a thumbs-up emoji. I find myself doing it too. I’ll keep my email tab open on my second monitor, watching it like a hawk. Every time a notification pings, I feel a microscopic jolt of dopamine-not because I’ve accomplished something, but because I’ve been summoned. I am relevant. I am ‘working.’ But the truth is, I haven’t written a meaningful sentence in 71 minutes because I’m too busy managing the optics of my availability. It’s exhausting to be this busy doing nothing.
The Expert’s Penalty
Efficiency Achieved (e.g., 21 Hours Work)
21 Hours
Reward: 20 more hours of meaningless meetings, not rest. We stretch the work to fill the time.
Why do we do this? It’s a failure of trust. When managers don’t know how to measure the impact of a software engineer’s code or a writer’s prose, they fall back on the only thing they can quantify: time. They want to see 41 hours a week of ‘presence.’ They want the calendar to look like a Tetris board with no gaps. This lack of trust creates a feedback loop where employees realize that high-quality, autonomous work that takes less time is actually a disadvantage. So, you learn to stretch the work. You learn to make the simple look complex. You learn the art of the ‘sync.’
[The performance of work has become more vital than the work itself.]
This is where the structure of our organizations begins to crumble. When we prioritize the appearance of busyness, we drive away the very people who are capable of actual productivity. The high-performers, the ones who value their time and hate the ‘pre-meeting for the meeting,’ are the first to burn out or jump ship. They don’t want to play the theater game. They want to solve problems. This is why organizations like
are so critical in the current market. By focusing on placing autonomous, high-level experts into roles where they are trusted to deliver results rather than just ‘presence,’ they bypass the need for the theater entirely. When you hire the right person-the person who knows how to navigate their field with precision-you don’t need to track their Slack status. You just need to look at the results.
The surface noise versus the underlying structure.
The Void Where Work Should Be
I remember a project I worked on roughly 11 years ago. It was a chaotic mess, but we were ‘productive.’ We had daily stand-ups that lasted 51 minutes. We had weekly retrospectives that turned into two-hour gripe sessions. At the end of the quarter, we had produced exactly one functional feature, but our internal dashboards showed 1001 resolved sub-tasks. We were heroes in the data, but failures in reality. We were so busy checking boxes that we forgot to build the box. I see this happening now on a global scale. We are obsessed with the 1% improvements in ‘engagement’ while ignoring the 91% of our time that is hemorrhaged into the void of administrative overhead.
The Chromatic Distraction
There’s a specific kind of guilt that comes with this. Last week, I spent 31 minutes crafting a perfectly worded response to a thread about which color the ‘Submit’ button should be. I used words like ‘user-centric’ and ‘chromatic accessibility.’ In reality, I didn’t care. No one cared.
Submit (Orange)
Wasted Focus: 31 Minutes
While I argued hue, a genuine backend problem went unnoticed because the engineer responsible was muted in a webinar, playing Minesweeper.
The Value of Quiet Expertise
If we want to fix this, we have to be willing to embrace the silence. We have to be okay with a calendar that has 4 or 5 empty hours in a row. We have to stop treating a fast Slack response as a proxy for intelligence. It’s hard, though. Our brains are wired for the immediate feedback of the theater. Seeing a ‘busy’ status feels like security. But true security comes from knowing that the work being done is actually moving the needle, even if it’s being done by someone who hasn’t posted a GIF in the #random channel for 81 hours.
The SUV Lesson in Efficiency
Direct Action
SUV Driver: Goal achieved immediately.
No Consensus
No syncs required for parking strategy.
Results Speak
Focus on outcome, not signaling.
I think back to that silver SUV. The driver was efficient. He saw a goal, he took the most direct path, and he achieved it. We spend so much time waiting for permission to be productive, or setting up the scenery for our productivity, that we lose the window of opportunity to actually act. We need to stop rewarding the people who are best at appearing busy and start looking for the ones who are suspiciously quiet because they’re actually getting things done.
It’s not enough to just say ‘work smarter, not harder.’ That’s another empty phrase we throw into 11-slide PowerPoints. We have to fundamentally change the way we value expertise. Precision should be rewarded with time, not more tasks. If a specialist can solve a problem in 11 minutes that takes a junior 101 minutes, the specialist shouldn’t be penalized for their efficiency. Yet, in the current theater, that specialist is the one who gets ‘volunteered’ for three more committees because they clearly have the ‘capacity.’ It’s a tax on talent that incentivizes mediocrity.
Risking the Empty Spot
As I look at my own schedule for tomorrow, I see 7 meetings. Only 1 of them has a clear agenda. The rest are ‘check-ins’ and ‘status updates.’ I’m tempted to cancel them all, but the fear of the ’empty spot’ is real. I don’t want to be the one who isn’t there. I don’t want someone else to slide into my space. But maybe that’s the risk we have to take. Maybe the only way to stop the theater is to refuse to take the stage. To sit in the dark, do the work, and let the results speak for themselves, even if the green dot goes grey for a while. We have to trust that the right people will notice the difference between the noise and the signal, between the actor and the expert. It’s a 101-level lesson in management that we’ve somehow managed to fail for decades.
The Uncomfortable Question
In the next ‘pre-meeting,’ ask yourself: If this meeting didn’t happen, would the project fail, or would I just feel less ‘seen’?
The answer is the only path back to actual productivity.
In the end, the theater is just a comfort blanket for the insecure. It’s a way to feel like we’re in control of a world that is increasingly chaotic and unpredictable. But the blanket is starting to fray. We are all becoming aware of the artifice. Let the SUV take the spot. You have better things to do than wait in line for a performance that no one is actually watching.