Efficiency Vs. Busyness Theater

The allure of appearing busy

At some point in my mid-twenties I developed a very specific habit: whenever I felt uncertain about whether I was doing enough work, I would open my email client. Not to read anything in particular. Not to respond to anything that required a response. Just to open it, scroll through it, and let the act of checking feel like the act of working. The uncertainty would recede. I had somewhere to put my eyes, something to do with my hands. I was, by any external measure, working.

I did not connect this to anxiety for a long time. I thought it was efficiency. I thought I was staying on top of things. What I was actually doing was performing productivity for an audience of one, which is a strange theater to find yourself in, but a very common one in the technology sector, where the question of whether you are doing enough is always quietly present and almost never answered.

The allure of appearing busy is not, I want to be clear, about laziness or deception. It is not primarily about fooling your manager or padding your calendar to avoid additional assignments, though those things happen. It is about something more basic and more sympathetic than that. Being visibly busy is one of the few reliable ways to temporarily silence the question of whether you are valuable enough, contributing enough, present enough. Activity is legible. It has a shape that other people can see. Deep thinking does not. Strategy does not. The four hours you spent in a state of near-total stillness while your brain worked through a hard architectural problem does not look, from the outside, like anything at all.

This is partly an office design problem. The open-plan workspace, which the technology industry adopted with considerable enthusiasm in the 2000s and has only recently begun to question, is a panopticon organized around the premise that visible activity equals productive activity. If you are at your desk and your fingers are moving, you are working. If you are at your desk and you are staring at the middle distance with your hands in your lap, you are not working, or at least you risk appearing not to be, which in a performance-evaluation context amounts to the same thing. The architecture of the space trains you to perform busyness the way a stage trains an actor: you are always potentially in view, so you are always potentially on.

Slack formalized this performance in software. The green dot is a status indicator in the technical sense, but it is also a status indicator in the social sense. Being available, being responsive, being seen to be engaged: these are the signals the platform is built to generate and reward. The person who replies within four minutes to every message in six channels is legible as a contributor in a way that the person who went dark for three hours to produce the technical design document that will save the project is not, at least not in real time, which is the only time that the always-on communication layer knows how to measure.

I have watched startups hollow themselves out this way. The culture rewards velocity of response, so people optimize for velocity of response. The meetings multiply because meetings are visible, because being in a meeting is an unambiguous answer to the question of what you are doing right now. The Slack channels fill with status updates and reactions and threads about the threads. Everyone is busy. The roadmap does not move.

There is something particular that happens to neurodivergent workers in this environment, and it took me a long time to name it accurately. For those of us with ADHD, the performance of busyness and the experience of busyness are often radically disconnected. The ADHD-i brain is either hyperfocused or it is not focused, and neither state is especially legible as conventional productivity. Hyperfocus looks, from the outside, like someone who has been staring at the same screen for four hours without moving or responding to messages. Absence of focus looks like exactly what it is. Neither produces the steady, metronomic appearance of work-in-progress that open-plan office culture reads as engaged.

The autistic brain has a different problem, which is that the energy required to perform a social state (busy, available, visibly engaged) competes directly with the energy required to actually think. Masking, the process by which many autistic people learn to present neurotypical behavior in neurotypical environments, is metabolically expensive in a way that is genuinely difficult to explain to people who have never had to do it. If I am spending energy making sure I look appropriately occupied, I am not spending that energy on the problem I was hired to solve. The performance consumes the resource it is meant to signal.

What this means at a structural level is that the organizations most addicted to the theater of busyness are systematically undervaluing the people most capable of the kind of work that cannot be performed. The deep thinker who needs long stretches of uninterrupted stillness. The engineer who solves the problem in the shower after two days of apparent inactivity. The strategist who has learned that their best thinking happens in the early morning before anyone can see them, and who therefore arranges their calendar to protect that time, and who is often perceived as difficult or insufficiently collaborative as a result.

The allure is real, and I want to sit with that for a moment rather than dismiss it. The performance of busyness works, in the short term, for reasons that are psychologically legitimate. It reduces anxiety. It provides social cover. It generates the small neurological rewards of visible completion (the email responded to, the Slack message reacted to, the meeting attended and survived) in place of the large and often delayed rewards of actual output. If you are a person who lives with the chronic low-level fear that you are not enough, that you are about to be found out, that the thing you are supposedly expert in is about to exceed your grasp, then a day spent visibly busy is a day that provides continuous small proofs against that fear. A day spent in deep, invisible work is a day that requires you to sit with the fear for hours at a stretch, trusting that what you are doing is real even when it cannot be seen.

That is a hard thing to ask of anyone. It is a particularly hard thing to ask without providing the structural conditions that make it possible: protected time, async-first communication norms, evaluation systems that measure output rather than activity, and leadership that does not confuse presence with contribution.

The organizations that figure this out tend to do it the hard way, after watching their most productive people disappear. The deep thinkers almost never quit loudly. They just gradually reallocate their energy toward the parts of their lives where their actual output is visible and valued, and they do less and less of the work that was the whole reason they were hired in the first place.

Then they leave. And everyone is surprised.