The pointer slides across the pixelated white landscape of the screen, a desperate, rhythmic dance designed to keep a tiny circle from turning yellow. It’s 5:48 PM. My actual work-the problem-solving, the writing, the synthesis of data-concluded at exactly 4:08 PM. I have spent the last 100 or so minutes engaged in the digital equivalent of sweeping a floor that is already spotless. This is the theater. The lights are up, the audience-a middle manager with a dashboard-is watching, and I am the lead actor in a tragedy titled The Billable Hour. I’ve caught myself doing this more often than I’d like to admit, rehearsing a conversation in my head where I justify these empty hours to a ghost version of my boss who doesn’t even exist. I tell him about the deep focus required for the 18 pages of documentation I finished, but in the dream, he only cares that my Teams status stayed green until the sun went down.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from faking effort. It is heavier than the fatigue of genuine labor. When you work hard, you finish with a sense of completion; when you perform work, you finish with a sense of fraud. We are living through an era where the tools of our liberation-remote work, asynchronous communication, automation-have been repurposed into the tools of our surveillance. Managers who never learned how to measure the quality of a thought or the impact of a decision fall back on the only thing they can quantify: presence. If they can see you, you must be working. If the little light is green, the engine is running. But an engine running in neutral for 88 hours a week still goes nowhere, even if it burns through all the fuel.

The Art of Carrying Weight

Zara C., a court sketch artist I met during a particularly long and dry civil trial, once told me that her job isn’t to draw people; it’s to draw the weight they carry. She sat in the back of the room, her charcoal scratching against the paper, capturing the specific slump of a lawyer who knew he was losing, and the performative rigidity of a witness trying too hard to look honest. She noticed that the judges who leaned forward more often during 18-minute intervals were perceived as more authoritative, regardless of the quality of their legal rulings.

The courtroom is perhaps the ultimate stage for productivity theater. Everyone there is performing a role-justice, contrition, authority-and the actual truth is often buried under layers of procedural fluff. Zara C. doesn’t look at the evidence; she looks at the sweat on the upper lip. She sees the performance. In the corporate world, we have become our own court sketch artists, meticulously drawing a version of ourselves that looks sufficiently burdened by ‘deliverables’ so that no one questions our right to a paycheck.

The Feedback Loop of Mediocrity

This crisis of trust isn’t just a management failure; it’s a systemic rot. When a manager can’t define what ‘good’ looks like, they settle for ‘busy.’ I remember a project where I finished my portion 48 hours ahead of schedule. Instead of being rewarded with time back or a new challenge, I was greeted with suspicious glances. ‘Are you sure you were thorough?’ the director asked. The implication was clear: the value wasn’t in the result, but in the visible struggle.

I learned my lesson. On the next project, I finished in the same amount of time but waited until 6:08 PM on the deadline day to hit send. I spent the intervening days reading novels behind a spreadsheet. My performance review that year was stellar. I was ‘dedicated.’ I was ‘willing to go the extra mile.’ In reality, I was just a better liar.

This performative culture creates a feedback loop of mediocrity. If the reward for efficiency is more work, the rational actor will become inefficient. We start creating 28-slide decks for meetings that could have been an 8-word text message. We CC 18 people on an email to prove we are ‘collaborating.’ We schedule ‘syncs’ to talk about the work we aren’t doing because we’re too busy syncing. It’s a collective hallucination where we all pretend the noise is the music.

It’s physically taxing, too. The constant state of ‘readiness’ keeps the nervous system on high alert. I’ve found that the tension in my shoulders after a day of faking it is far worse than after a day of genuine intensity. It reminds me of the holistic approach discussed at

White Rock Naturopathic, where the focus is on the systemic cause of the tension-the environment and the stress response-rather than just treating the symptom. Our corporate environments are designed to trigger a chronic stress response, forcing us to remain in a state of ‘defensive productivity’ where the goal isn’t to create, but to not be caught resting.

Measuring the Shadow, Forgetting the Object

I once spent 38 minutes debating whether to use a semicolon or a period in an email, not because I care about the nuances of punctuation, but because I wanted the timestamp to show I was still online and ‘engaged’ with the details. It was a pathetic display of insecurity. I was more worried about the perception of my work than the work itself. This is the heart of the problem: when we measure the shadow, we forget the object that casts it. We have become a culture of shadow-chasers. We celebrate the 80-hour work week not because 80 hours of value are being produced, but because 80 hours of sacrifice are being witnessed. It’s a secular form of flagellation. We hurt ourselves to prove we care.

The Loyal Employee Lie

We do the same thing every day at 4:48 PM when we feel the urge to leave but stay until 6:08 PM because the boss’s light is still on. We are performing ‘loyal employee’ while our internal world-our families, our hobbies, our rest-is being neglected. We are white-knuckling our way through a career because we are afraid that if we stop moving, the audience will realize there’s nothing behind the curtain.

The Dangerous Admission

To break this cycle requires a radical, almost terrifying level of honesty. It requires managers to admit they don’t know how to measure output and employees to admit that they can probably do their jobs in 28 hours a week if they stopped the theater. But that admission is dangerous. If I can do my job in half the time, does that mean I’m worth half the pay? In a sane world, it would mean I’m twice as valuable. In the world of productivity theater, it means I’m a target for downsizing. So we keep the mouse moving. We keep the green light on. We keep sending those 8:08 PM emails that could have waited until morning, just to leave a digital trail of our ‘commitment.’

I’ve made mistakes in this journey, certainly. I once called out a colleague for not responding to a Slack message for 48 minutes, projecting my own anxiety about ‘visibility’ onto him. I realized later that he was probably doing the very thing I claim to value: deep, uninterrupted work. I was the villain in his story, the one demanding he stop working to prove he was working. It’s a mistake I try not to repeat, but the pull of the theater is strong. It’s a social contract we’ve all signed without reading the fine print. We agree to pretend to work, and they agree to pretend to believe us, and in the end, the only thing that’s real is the burnout.

If we want to reclaim our time and our sanity, we have to start by valuing outcomes over activity. We have to be okay with the silence. If a task takes 8 minutes, it should only take 8 minutes of our life. We shouldn’t have to stretch it out to fill the gaps between 9:08 AM and 5:08 PM. We need to stop rewarding the person who stays the latest and start rewarding the person who solves the problem the fastest. Until then, we are just actors on a very expensive, very digital stage, wiggling our mouses and waiting for the final curtain to drop so we can finally go home and start our real lives. The question isn’t whether we can afford to stop the theater. The question is whether we can afford to keep it running for another 48 years while the world moves on without us.