MamaWritesSpells

On optics, output, and exhaustion.

Somewhere along the way, productivity stopped being about getting things done and started being about looking like things were getting done.

You can feel the shift in the room.

Calendars packed wall to wall.
Slack messages flying at all hours.
Status updates polished like mini press releases.

Everyone is moving.
No one seems to be arriving.

This is productivity as performance art — work staged for visibility instead of outcomes. The goal isn’t progress so much as proof of effort. Evidence that you were present, responsive, engaged, on it.

It’s exhausting. And weirdly empty.

Because performance has an audience. And in modern work, that audience is constant. Managers. Clients. Algorithms. Each other. There’s always someone who might be watching — or worse, measuring.

So people adapt.

They narrate their labor.
They stay “on” longer than is useful.
They choose visible tasks over meaningful ones because meaning is quieter and harder to screenshot.

Deep work doesn’t announce itself.
Thinking looks like staring.
Rest looks like absence.

So we replace them with motion.

Meetings multiply. Check-ins breed follow-ups. Tools stack on tools until managing the work becomes the work. And because everyone is tired, nobody wants to be the one to say, “Is this actually helping?”

Productivity theater thrives in environments that reward urgency over effectiveness. Where speed is praised but direction is fuzzy. Where being busy is safer than being deliberate.

Here’s the uncomfortable part: most people aren’t choosing this. They’re responding to incentives.

When output is hard to measure, optics take over.
When trust is thin, visibility becomes currency.
When leadership is unclear, activity fills the gap.

But motion without intention isn’t productivity.
It’s noise.

Real productivity is often boring.
It involves fewer meetings, not more.
Clear decisions that reduce future work instead of generating it.
Long stretches of quiet where nothing appears to be happening — until suddenly, something important is done.

And it doesn’t need applause.

The teams doing the best work I’ve seen aren’t loud. They don’t perform their effort. They don’t constantly prove they’re working. They just… are.

They’ve built systems that don’t require theater.
They trust people enough to let work be invisible while it’s forming.
They care more about results than rituals.

If productivity in your environment feels performative, that’s not a personal failure. It’s a signal. Something in the system is rewarding appearance over impact.

The fix isn’t “work harder.”
It’s asking better questions.

What actually moves this forward?
What can we stop pretending matters?
What would this look like if no one were watching?

When productivity stops being a performance, work gets quieter.
And somehow — almost suspiciously — more gets done.

(Not flashy. Just real.)